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Robert Lowell

I lived from 1917-1977. I was from the USA, and am in the Americas category.

I influenced poet Anne Sexton.

Robert Lowell was born in 1917 into one of Boston's oldest and most prominent families. He attended Harvard College for two years before transferring to Kenyon College, where he studied poetry under John Crowe Ransom and received an undergraduate degree in 1940. He took graduate courses at Louisiana State University where he studied with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1946, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy. Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.

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  • To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage
    "It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
    these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."
    17 lines, 3 comments
  • The Old Flame
    My old flame, my wife!
    Remember our lists of birds?
    45 lines
  • Children of Light
    Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones
    And fenced their gardens with the Redmen's bones;
    10 lines, 2 comments
  • Epilogue
    Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
    why are they no help to me now
    23 lines, 1 comment
  • The Drunken Fisherman
    Wallowing in this bloody sty,
    I cast for fish that pleased my eye
    40 lines
  • Dolphin
    My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
    a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
    15 lines, 1 comment
  • Man and Wife
    Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed;
    the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
    28 lines, 1 comment
  • Waking in the Blue
    The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
    rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head
    50 lines
  • For the Union Dead
    Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam.
    The old South Boston Aquarium stands
    80 lines
  • Home After Three Months Away
    Gone now the baby's nurse,
    a lioness who ruled the roost
    40 lines
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