Роберт Лоуэлл: Жизнь и творчество американского поэта

American poet (1917–1977)

Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV ('/l//oʊ//əl/; March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) was an American poet. He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the Mayflower. His family, past and present, were important subjects in his poetry. Growing up in Boston also informed his poems, which were frequently set in Boston and the New England region. The literary scholar Paula Hayes believes that Lowell mythologized New England, particularly in his early work. Lowell stated, "The poets who most directly influenced me were Allen Tate, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams. An unlikely combination! but you can see that Bishop is a sort of bridge between Tate's formalism and Williams's informal art." Lowell wrote in both formal, metered verse as well as free verse; his verse in some poems from Life Studies and Notebook fell somewhere in between metered and free verse. After the publication of his 1959 book Life Studies, which won the 1960 National Book Award and "featured a new emphasis on intense, uninhibited discussion of personal, family, and psychological struggles", he was considered an important part of the confessional poetry movement. However, much of Lowell's work, which often combined the public with the personal, did not conform to a typical "confessional poetry" model. Instead, Lowell worked in a number of distinctive stylistic modes and forms over the course of his career. In addition to winning the National Book Award, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947 and 1974, the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1947. He is "widely considered one of the most important American poets of the postwar era."

Lowell was born to United States Navy Cmdr. Robert Traill Spence Lowell III and Charlotte Winslow in Boston, Massachusetts. The Lowells were a Boston Brahmin family that included poets Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell; clergymen Charles Russell Lowell Sr. and Robert Traill Spence Lowell; Civil War general and war hero Charles Russell Lowell III (about whom Lowell wrote his poem "Charles Russell Lowell: 1835 1864"); and the Federal Judge John Lowell. His mother was a descendant of William Samuel Johnson, a signer of the United States Constitution; Jonathan Edwards, the Calvinist theologian (about whom Lowell wrote the poems "Mr. Edwards and the Spider", "Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts", "After the Surprising Conversions", and "The Worst Sinner"); Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan preacher and healer; Robert Livingston (who was also an ancestor on Lowell's paternal side); Thomas Dudley, the second governor of Massachusetts; and Mayflower passengers James Chilton and his daughter Mary Chilton. Lowell's parents share a common descent from Philip Livingston, the son of Robert Livingston, and were sixth cousins. As well as a family history steeped in Protestantism, Lowell had notable Jewish ancestors on both sides of his family, which he discusses in Part II ("91 Revere Street") of Life Studies. On his father's side, Lowell was the great great grandson of Maj. Mordecai Myers (father of Theodorus Bailey Myers, Lowell's great granduncle), a soldier in the War of 1812 and later mayor of Kinderhook and Schenectady; and on his mother's side, he was descended from the German Jewish Mordecai family of Raleigh, North Carolina, who were prominent in state affairs.

As a youth, Lowell had a penchant for violence and bullying other children. Describing himself as an 8½ year old in the prose piece "91 Revere Street", Lowell wrote that he was "thick witted, narcissistic, thuggish". As a teenager, Lowell's peers gave him the nickname "Cal" after both the villainous Shakespeare character Caliban and the tyrannical Roman emperor Caligula, and the nickname stuck with him throughout his life. Lowell later referenced the nickname in his poem "Caligula", first published in his book For the Union Dead and later republished in a revised sonnet version for his book, Notebook 1967–1968. Lowell received his high school education at St. Mark's School, a prominent prep school in Southborough, Massachusetts. There he met and was influenced by the poet Richard Eberhart, who taught at the school, and as a high school student, Lowell decided that he wanted to become a poet. At St. Mark's, he became lifelong friends with Frank Parker, an artist who later created the prints that Lowell used on the covers of most of his books. Lowell attended Harvard College for two years. While he was a freshman at Harvard, he visited Robert Frost in Cambridge and asked for feedback on a long poem he had written on the Crusades; Frost suggested that Lowell needed to work on his compression. In an interview, Lowell recalled, "I had a huge blank verse epic on the First Crusade and took it to him all in my undecipherable pencil writing, and he read a little of it, and said, 'It goes on rather a bit, doesn't it?' And then he read me the opening of Keats's 'Hyperion', the first version, and I thought all of that was sublime." After two years at Harvard, Lowell was unhappy, and his psychiatrist, Merrill Moore, who was also a poet, suggested that Lowell take a leave of absence from Harvard to get away from his parents and study with Moore's friend, the poet professor Allen Tate who was then living in Nashville and teaching at Vanderbilt University. Lowell called the act "a terrible piece of youthful callousness". Partly in rebellion against his parents, Lowell converted from Episcopalianism to Catholicism. After Lowell graduated from Kenyon in 1940 with a degree in Classics, he worked on a master's degree in English literature at Louisiana State University and taught introductory courses in English for one year before the U. S. entered World War II.

Lowell was a conscientious objector during World War II and served several months at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. He explained his decision not to serve in World War II in a letter addressed to President Franklin Roosevelt on September 7, 1943, stating, "Dear Mr President: I very much regret that I must refuse the opportunity you offer me in your communication of August 6, 1943 for service in the Armed Force." He explained that after the bombing at Pearl Harbor, he was prepared to fight in the war until he read about the American terms of unconditional surrender that he feared would lead to the "permanent destruction of Germany and Japan." Ian Hamilton notes that "throughout [1967], [Lowell] was in demand as a speaker and petition signer [against the war]. He was vehemently opposed to the war, but equivocal about being identified too closely with the 'peace movement': there were many views he did not share with the more fiery of the 'peaceniks' and it was not in his nature to join movements that he had no wish to lead." However, Lowell did participate in the October 1967 March on the Pentagon in Washington, D. C. against the war and was one of the featured speakers at the event. Lowell was also a signer of the anti war manifesto "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" circulated by members of the radical intellectual collective RESIST. In 1968, Lowell publicly supported the Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president in a three way primary against Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. Lowell spoke at numerous fundraisers for McCarthy in New York that year, but "[his] heart went out of the race" after Robert Kennedy's assassination.

From 1950 to 1953, Lowell taught in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, together with Paul Engle and Robie Macauley. Later, Donald James Winslow hired Lowell to teach at Boston University, where his students included the poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Over the years, he taught at a number of other universities including the University of Cincinnati, Yale University, Harvard University, and the New School for Social Research. In 2012, Spivack also published a book, With Robert Lowell and His Circle, about her experience studying with Lowell at Boston University in 1959. From 1963 to 1970, Lowell commuted from his home in New York City to Boston to teach classes at Harvard.

In March 2005, the Academy of American Poets named Life Studies one of their Groundbreaking Books of the 20th century, stating that it had "a profound impact", particularly over the confessional poetry movement that the book helped launch. The editors of Contemporary Literary Criticism wrote that the book "exerted a profound influence on subsequent American poets, including other first generation confessionalists such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton." In a 1962 interview, Sylvia Plath stated that Life Studies had influenced the poetry she was writing at that time (and which her husband, Ted Hughes, would publish posthumously as Ariel a few years later): "I've been very excited by what I feel is the new breakthrough that came with, say, Robert Lowell's Life Studies, this intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience which I feel has been partly taboo. Robert Lowell's poems about his experience in a mental hospital, for example, interested me very much." In an essay published in 1985, the poet Stanley Kunitz wrote that Life Studies was "perhaps the most influential book of modern verse since T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land." During the 1960s, Lowell was the most public, well known American poet; in June 1967, he appeared on the cover of Time as part of a cover story in which he was praised as "the best American poet of his generation." Although the article gave a general overview of modern American poetry (mentioning Lowell's contemporaries like John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop), Lowell's life, career, and place in the American literary canon remained the article's focus.

Lowell married the novelist and short story writer Jean Stafford in 1940. Before their marriage, in 1938, Lowell and Stafford were in a serious car crash, in which Lowell was at the wheel, that left Stafford permanently scarred, while Lowell walked away unscathed. The impact crushed Stafford's nose and cheekbone and required her to undergo multiple reconstructive surgeries. that ended in 1948. Shortly thereafter, in 1949, Lowell married the writer Elizabeth Hardwick with whom he had a daughter, Harriet, in 1957. After Hardwick's death in 2007, The New York Times would characterize the marriage as "restless and emotionally harrowing," reflecting the very public portrait of their marriage and divorce as Lowell captured it in his books For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin. After 23 years of marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick, in 1970, Lowell left her for Caroline Blackwood. Blackwood and Lowell were married in 1972 in England where they decided to settle and where they raised their son, Sheridan. Lowell also became the stepfather to Blackwood's young daughter, Ivana, for whom he would write the sonnet "Ivana," published in his book The Dolphin. Lowell had a close friendship with the poet Elizabeth Bishop that lasted from 1947 until Lowell's death in 1977. Both writers relied upon one another for critiques of their poetry (which is in evidence in their voluminous correspondence, published in the book Words in Air: the Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell in 2008) and thereby influenced one another's work. Bishop's influence over Lowell can be seen at work in at least two of Lowell's poems: "The Scream" (inspired by Bishop's short story "In the Village") and "Skunk Hour" (inspired by Bishop's poem "The Armadillo"), and the scholar Thomas Travisano notes, more broadly, that "Lowell's Life Studies and For the Union Dead, his most enduringly popular books, were written under Bishop's direct influence." Lowell also maintained a close friendship with Randall Jarrell from their 1937 meeting at Kenyon College until Jarrell's 1965 death. Lowell openly acknowledged Jarrell's influence over his writing and frequently sought out Jarrell's input regarding his poems before he published them. In a letter to Jarrell from 1957, Lowell wrote, "I suppose we shouldn't swap too many compliments, but I am heavily in your debt."

Lowell was hospitalized many times throughout his adult life due to bipolar disorder, the mental condition then known as "manic depression". On multiple occasions, Lowell was admitted to the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and one of his poems, "Waking in the Blue", references his stay in this large psychiatric facility. While bipolar disorder was often a great burden to the writer and his family, it also provided the subject for some of Lowell's most influential poetry, as in his book Life Studies. When he was fifty, Lowell began taking lithium to treat the condition. Saskia Hamilton, the editor of Lowell's Letters, notes, "Lithium treatment relieved him from suffering the idea that he was morally and emotionally responsible for the fact that he relapsed. However, it did not entirely prevent relapses And he was troubled and anxious about the impact of his relapses on his family and friends until the end of his life."

Lowell died from a heart attack in a taxicab in Manhattan on September 12, 1977, at the age of 60, while on his way to see his ex wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. He was buried in Stark Cemetery in Dunbarton, New Hampshire.

Lowell's early poetry was "characterized by its Christian motifs and symbolism, historical references, and intricate formalism." His first three volumes were notably influenced by the New Critics, particularly Lowell's former professors, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. The book was published by a small press as a limited edition, but still received some "decent reviews" from major publications like Poetry and Partisan Review. In 1946, Lowell received wide acclaim for his next book, Lord Weary's Castle, which included five poems slightly revised from Land of Unlikeness and thirty new poems. Among the better known poems in the volume are "Mr. Edwards and the Spider" and "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket." Lord Weary's Castle was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. That year, Lowell also was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Although Jarrell liked the shorter poems, he thought the epic title poem didn't work, stating ""The people [in 'The Mills of the Kavanaughs'] too often seem to be acting in the manner of Robert Lowell, rather than plausibly as real people act . I doubt that many readers will think them real." In his acceptance speech for the National Book Award, Lowell famously divided American poetry into two camps: the "cooked" and the "raw." This commentary by Lowell was made in reference to the popularity of Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation poets and was a signal from Lowell that he was trying to incorporate some of their "raw" energy into his own poetry. The poems in Life Studies were written in a mix of free and metered verse, with much more informal language than he had used in his first three books. Lowell's editor and friend Frank Bidart notes in his afterword to Lowell's Collected Poems, "Lowell is widely, perhaps indelibly associated with the term 'confessional,'" though Bidart questions the accuracy of this label. But for better or worse, this label stuck and led to Lowell being grouped together with other influential confessional poets like Lowell's former students W. D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton.

Lowell followed Life Studies with Imitations (1961), a volume of loose translations of poems by classical and modern European poets, including Rilke, Montale, Baudelaire, Pasternak, and Rimbaud, for which he received the 1962 Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize. However, critical response to Imitations was mixed and sometimes hostile (as was the case with Vladimir Nabokov's public response to Lowell's Mandelstam translations). In a review of Lowell's Collected Poems, the poet Michael Hofmann wrote that although he thought Life Studies was Lowell's best book, Imitations was Lowell's most "pivotal book," arguing that the book "marks the entry into his work of what one might term 'international style', something coolly open to not quite English." In the book's introduction, Lowell explained that his idiosyncratic translations should be thought of as "imitations" rather than strict translations since he took many liberties with the originals, trying to "do what [his] authors might have done if they were writing their poems now and in America." Also in 1961, Lowell published his English translation of the French verse play Phèdre by 17th century playwright Jean Racine. Lowell's next book of original verse For the Union Dead (1964) was widely praised, particularly for its title poem, which invoked Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead." Helen Vendler states that the title poem in the collection "honors not only the person of [the Civil War hero] Robert Gould Shaw, but also the stern and beautiful memorial bronze bas relief [depicting Shaw and the all black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment] which stands opposite the Boston State House." Paula Hayes observes that, in this volume, "Lowell turned his attention toward ecology, Civil Rights, and labor rights often to the effect of combining the three concerns." For the Union Dead was Lowell's first book since Life Studies to contain all original verse (since it did not include any translations), and in writing the poems in this volume, Lowell built upon the looser, more personal style of writing that he had established in the final section of Life Studies. The play was published in its first printing in 1965 (with a revised edition following in 1968). In 1967, Lowell published his next book of poems, Near the Ocean. With this volume, Lowell returned to writing more formal, metered verse. The second half of the book also shows Lowell returning once again to writing loose translations (including verse approximations of Dante, Juvenal, and Horace). The best known poem in this volume is "Waking Early Sunday Morning," which was written in eight line tetrameter stanzas (borrowed from Andrew Marvell's poem "Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland") and showed contemporary American politics overtly entering into Lowell's work. Ian Hamilton noted that "'Waking Early Sunday Morning' is now thought of as a key 'political poem' of the 1960s." In the Notebook poems, Lowell included the poem "In The Cage," a sonnet that he had originally published in Lord Weary's Castle. He also included revised, sonnet versions of the poems "Caligula" and "Night Sweat" (originally published in For the Union Dead) and of "1958" and "To Theodore Roethke: 1908 1963" (originally published in Near the Ocean). In his "Afterthought" at the end of Notebook 1967 1968, Lowell explained the premise and timeline of the book: <blockquote>This is not my diary, my confession, not a puritan's too literal pornographic honesty, glad to share private embarrassment, and triumph. The time is a summer, an autumn, a winter, a spring, another summer; here the poem ends, except for turned back bits of fall and winter 1968 My plot rolls with the seasons. The separate poems and sections are opportunist and inspired by impulse. Accident threw up subjects, and the plot swallowed them famished for human chances. I lean heavily to the rational, but am devoted to surrealism. Lowell liked the new form so much that he reworked and revised many of the poems from Notebook and used them as the foundation for his next three volumes of verse, all of which employed the same loose, fourteen line sonnet form. In 1969, Lowell made his last foray into dramatic work with the publication of his prose translation of the ancient Greek play Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus.

In 2001, the alternative rock band They Might Be Giants wrote and recorded a song called "Robert Lowell" which uses Lowell's poem "Memories of West Street and Lepke" as the basis for the lyrics. Lowell's friendship with Elizabeth Bishop was the subject of the play Dear Elizabeth by Sarah Ruhl which was first performed at the Yale Repertory Theater in 2012. Ruhl used Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell as the basis for her play. Lowell was a featured subject in the 2014 HBO documentary The 50 Year Argument about The New York Review of Books which Lowell and his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, were both involved in founding. Although Lowell was not involved with editing the review, he was a frequent contributor. Lowell is featured in voice over, photographs, video, and Derek Walcott reads from an essay on Lowell that Walcott published in The New York Review of Books after Lowell's death.