American poet, noted for his complex, oratorical poetry, and turbulent life. Lowell was called the father of the confessional poets, a term used to describe among others Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman. Lowell's work grew from his own unhappiness and the social, political, and ideological movements in the U.S. during the Post World War II decades. He was a heavy drinker, and was married three times. From 1949 the manic-depressive Lowell spent periods in mental hospitals.

Work-table, litter, books and standing lamp,
plain things, my stalled equipment, the old broom—
but I am living in a tidied room,
for ten nights now I've felt the creeping damp
float over my pajamas' wilted white . . .
Sweet salt embalms me and my head is wet,
everything streams and tells me this is right;
my life's fever is soaking in night sweat—
one life, one writing! . . .
(from 'Night Sweat,' in Life Studies and For The Union Dead, The Noonday Press, sixth printing, 1979, p. 68)

Robert Lowell was born in Boston, the son of Robert Traill Spence Lowell, a naval officer, and Charlotte (Winslow) Lowell, the dominating figure in Robert's childhood. "Like Henry Adams, I, too, was born under the shadow of the Boston State House, and under Pisces, the Fish, on the first of March 1917. (Memoirs by Robert Lowell, 2022, p. 13) Other members of the distinguished, intellectual family included the poet and critic James Russell Lowell and the poet Amy Lowell. Robert was nicknamed Cal, partly after the Roman emperor Caligula, known for his cruelty, and Caliban, familiar from Shakespeare's play The Tempest.

Lowell began writing at St. Mark's School, where his teacher was Richard Eberhart. At school he penned an essay entitled 'War: A Justification,' foreshadowing his belligerent way of life. While studying English literature at Harvard, Lowell met Robert Frost, who was delivering the Norton lectures there, and asked his opinion about a long poem (the subject was the First Crusade) he had written in longhand on lined paper.

Despite the clumsy effort, Frost recognized Lowell's talent, and helped him on a number of occasions. Among the younger poets, Lowell became Frost's closest friend. Frost also visited Lowell in a mental hospital in 1949. One of Lowell's great idols was Ezra Pound, whom he visited at St. Elizabeths Hospital, where Pound was confined for more than twelve years, from 1946-1958. In a letter to Pound in March 1954, Lowell enclosed the poem 'Adolf Hitler vo Linz (Siegfried).' Lowell believed that there is a deep interrelation between fascism and modernism. On the wall of his study, Lowell had a large portrait of Pound.

When Lowell's parents rejected the woman he proposed to marry, he broke from his family. On the advice of a psychiatrist, he transferred to Kenyon College (Ohio). There he studied poetry and criticism, graduating in 1940. His teachers included John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), who was a member of the Agrarian Movement. In 1940 Lowell converted Roman Catholicism and married against his parents' will the writer Jean Stafford – they divorced eight years later. In 1949 Lowell married the novelist and critic Elisabeth Hardwick. However, two years earlier Lowell had met the poet Elizabet Bishop, who influenced deeply his work. The poem 'Skunk Hour' in Life Studies (1959) was dedicated to Bishop: "Nautilus Island's hermit / heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; / her sheep still graze above the sea. / Her son's a bishop. Her farmer / is first selectman in our village; / she's in her dotage." (Life Studies and For The Union Dead, p. 68)

At Kenyon College Lowell formed a friendship Peter Taylor and Randall Jarrell. After graduating, Lowell moved on a fellowship to Louisiana State University, where he worked with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. Although Lowell tried to enlist in the armed forces during WW II, he declared himself a conscientious objector by the time he was called for service. Lowell's decision was based on his religious beliefs; he had become a Catholic in 1941, and argued that by bombing German civilians, the United States had ceased to fight a defensive war and thus it could not be justified by the church. In 1943 Lowell served five months of a prison sentence for refusing the draft, first at the West Street Jail in New York City, then at the Federal Correctional Center in Danbury, Connecticut. After being granted parole, Lowell served in Bridgeport, CT, where he cleaned the nurses' quarters at St. Vincent's Hospital. It is possible that the experiences of imprisonment played some role when his mental health later collapsed. To his time in Danbury Lowell returned in such poems as 'In the Cage' (1946) and 'Rats'.

In his first collection of poetry, the autobiographical Land of Unlikeness (1944), Lowell used Christian symbolism and juxtaposed the world of grace to the urban life. His second book, Lord Weary's Castle (1946), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, marked a return to the New England milieu. It included the famous 'The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.' "This is the end of running on the waves; / We are poured out like water. Who will dance / The mast-lashed master of Leviathans / Up from this field of Quakers in their graves?" (Lord Weary's Castle, and The Mills of the Kavanaughs, two volumes of poems, Meridian Books, 1961, p. 11) This poem referred to such sources as Henry David Thoreau's Cape Cod, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, and the Bible. Captain Ahab and his pursuit of the great whale is a central image. Some poems had religious themes, such as 'The Holy Innocents' and 'Christmas in Black Rock'. he wrote a love poem, 'Walking in the Blue'. Upon hearing of the success of his protégé, Frost wrote to him: "Isn't it fine that the young promise I began to entertain hopes of when it visited me on Fayerweather Street Cambridge in 1936, should have come to so much and to so much promise for the future?" (quoted in Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton, Random House, 1982, p. 129)

These two early books are among Lowell's confessional works, others were Life Studies (1959), which won the National Book Award in 1960, and The Dolphin (1973). The Mills of The Kavanaughs (1949), which blended classical myths with New England landscape, contained a narrative poem of some 600 lines and five other pieces.

With Elizabeth Bishop, whose North & South (1946) had been received with critical acclaim, Lowell kept up correspondence from 1947 until his death. In 1949 Lowell was hospitalized for mania at Baldpate Hospital in Georgetown, Massachusetts. "I'm in grand shape," he wrote in a letter from his padded cell to Bishop. "The world is full of wonders." (Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character by Kay Redfield Jamison, Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, p. 103) In McLean's Hospital, during one of his periodic incarcerations, he composed his famous love poem 'Walking in the Blue' for Anne Adden, whom he met in the hospital. Lowell, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was treated with electroconvulsive therapy (also known as electroshock or ECT). In his manic period he allegedly once held the poet Allen Tate out of a second-storey window while reciting 'Ode to the Confederate Dead'.

Lowell received the Harriet Monroe Poetry award in 1952 and the Guinness Poetry Award (shared with W.H. Auden, Edith Sitwell, and Edwin Muir) in 1959. In the 1950s, Lowell spent a few years abroad. He settled in 1954 in Boston, where he worked as a teacher at the University of Boston (1955-60). While in Boston, Sylvia Plath attended a poetry seminar run by Lowell. During this decade he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Cincinnati and Harvard University. The 1950s saw also the emergence of the Beat Generation, but in Boston the influence of the movement was not earth-shattering.

Lowell's interest in the history led him to translate such writers as Racine, Sappho, Rilke, and Baudelaire. He also produced versions of poems by such Russian writers as Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam. The trio of plays entitled The Old Glory – adapted for the stage from the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville – reflected Lowell's preoccupation with dilemmas of the American past. Between April 1955 and February 1957 Lowell worked on his autobiography, originally his intention was to tell about his childhood. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lowell wrote a number of unrhymed sonnets, in which he explored his own literary career. These works he published in Notebook 1967-68 (1969) and in revised form in Notebook (1970).

In the 1960s Lowell was active in the civil-rights and antiwar campaigns. He made a number of widely published political gestures, refusing among others to attend the White House Festival of the Arts because of opposition to the Vietnam war. On October 21, 1967, he took part in the march on the Pentagon along with such prominent figures as Norman Mailer, Paul Goodman, and Dr. Benjamin Spock. When Lowell met Mailer at a party on the eve of the march, he said, ""Elizabeth and I really think you're the finest journalist in America. . . ." "Well, Cal." said Mailer, . . . "there are days when I think of myself as being the best writer in America."" ('Notebook 1967-68: Writing the Process Poem' by Alex Calder, in Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry, edited by Steven Axelrod & Helen Deese, 1986, p. 126)

"Every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making public commitments," Lowell once said. From 1963 to 1970 he was a teacher at Harvard. His spech bore traces of a Southern accent, which was usually greeted at the university with incredulity of hostility. ('Robert Lowell in the Sixties' by Richard Tillinghast, in Robert Lowell, Interviews and Memoirs, edited by Jeffrey Meyers, 1988, p. 262) Being considered both chic and sophisticated, Lowell was featured on the cover of Time.

In 1972 Lowell divorced from his second wife. During the 1970s Lowell lived in England, where he was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford (1970), and visiting lecturer at the University of Essex (1970-72) and at the University of Kent (1970-1975). In 1973 Lowell published three collections of poetry. History recreated a host of historical figures from biblical times to the present. In For Lizzie and Harriet he talked about his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, and his daughter. In 'Harriet', Lowell kills a fly which seems apocalyptic in the house, whamming back and forth across the nursery bed, " and another instant's added / to the horrifying mortmain of / ephemera: keys, drift, sea-urchin shells, / you packrat off with joy . . . a dead fly swept / under the carpet, wrinkling to fulfillment." (Ibid., p. 13)

The Dolphin dealt with the poet's move to England as he left one wife for another. The third collection brought him another Pulitzer Prize, but he reviewers criticized him for using excerpts from his wife letters. The title poem was a celebration of feelings of love – the person behind the collection was Lowell's third wife, the writer Caroline Blackwood, of England's Guinness family. They had one child. Caroline had divorced twice; her first husband was the painter Lucian Freud, and her second was the composer Israel Citkowitz.

Lowell died of heart failure in a taxi on September 12, 1977, in New York, clutching Lucian Freud's portrait of his wife, named 'Girl in Bed'. At the time of his death, he was returning to his former wife and his daughter, after breaking with Caroline. His last collection was Day by Day, in which he used free verse like he had done in his early works. Lowell's record of his domestic history received posthumously in 1978 the National Book Critics Circle Award.

For further reading: The Achievement of Robert Lowell by J. Mazzaro (1960); The Poetic Themes of Robert Lowell by J. Mazzaro (1965); Robert Lowell: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by T. Parkinson (1968); Robert Lowell, ed. by R. Boyers and M. London (1970); Pity of the Monsters by A. Williamson (1972); Circle to Circle: The Poetry of Robert Lowell by S. Yenser (1974); Robert Lowell: Life and Art by S.G. Axelrod (1978); Robert Lowell by R.J. Fein (1979); Robert Lowell by Ian Hamilton (1982); Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs by J. Meuers (1988); Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell by P. Mariani (1994); Robert Lowell and the Sublime by H. Hart (1995); My First Cousin Once Removed by Sarah Payne Stuart (1998); Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton (2011); With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz & Others by Kathleen Spivack (2012); Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: a Study of Genius, Mania, and Character by Kay Redfield Jamison (2017); The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell and Their Circle, edited by Saskia Hamilton (2019); Robert Lowell in Context, edited by Thomas Austenfeld and Grzegorz Kośc (2024) - The first selection of Lowell's poems in Finnish translation  was published in 2019.

Selected works:

• Land of Unlikeness, 1944
• Lord Weary's Castle, 1946 (Pulitzer Prize)
• Poems: 1938-1949, 1950
• The Mills of The Kavanaughs, 1951
• Life Studies, 1959 (National Book Award)
  - Päivä päivältä ja muita runoja (suom. Kimmo Räntilä, 2019)
  
• Imitations, 1961 (translator)
  
• Phaedra / Racine, 1963 (translator)
• For the Union Dead, 1964
  - Päivä päivältä ja muita runoja (suom. Kimmo Räntilä, 2019)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864, 1964
• Selected Poems, 1964
• The Old Glory, 1965
• The Achievement of Robert Lowell: A Comprehensive Selection of His Poems, 1966 (edited by William J. Martz)
  
• Near the Ocean, 1967
• Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965, 1967 (editor, with P. Taylor and R.P. Warren)
• The Voyage / Baudelaire, 1968 (translator)
• Prometheus Bound / Aeschylus, 1969 (translator)
• Notebook 1967-68, 1969
• R.F.K., 1925-1968, 1969
• The Voyage & Other Versions of Poems of Baudelaire, 1968 (translator
• The Dolphin, 1973 (Pulitzer Prize)
• History, 1973
  - Päivä päivältä ja muita runoja (suom. Kimmo Räntilä, 2019)
• For Lizzie and Harriet, 1973
  - Päivä päivältä ja muita runoja (suom. Kimmo Räntilä, 2019)
• Robert Lowell's Poems, 1974
• Selected Poems, 1976
• Day by Day, 1977
  - Päivä päivältä ja muita runoja (suom. Kimmo Räntilä, 2019)
• The Oresteia / Aeschylus, 1978 (Agamemnon, Orestes, The Furies; translator)
• Life Studies and For The Union Dead, 1979
  
• Collected Prose, 1987
• Collected Poems, 2003 (edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter)
• The Letters of Robert Lowell, 2005 (edited by Saskia Hamilton)
• Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, 2008 (edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton)
• The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972-1973, 2019 (edited by Saskia Hamilton)
• Memoirs, 2022 (edited and with a preface by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc)