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Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (; 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.Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography. Faber & Faber, 1982. The literary scholar Paula Hayes believes that Lowell mythologized New England, particularly in his early work.Hayes, Paula. Robert Lowell and the Confessional Voice. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2013. p. 37.
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."Stanley Kunitz. "Talk with Robert Lowell." The New York Times. October 4, 1964. p. BR34. 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.National Book Award Website "National Book Awards – 1960""Robert Lowell (1917-1977)." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 124. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. p 251. 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.
He was appointed the sixth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, where he served from 1947 until 1948. 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." His biographer Paul Mariani called him "the poet-historian of our time" and "the last of America's influential public poets."Mariani, Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996. 10.
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, "Beyond Wikipedia: Notes on Robert Lowell's Family" Nicholas Jenkins: Arcade. May 7, 2010. Accessed November 16, 2012. 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; New York Council of Humanities and on his mother's side, he was descended from the German-Jewish Mordecai House family of Raleigh, North Carolina, who were prominent in state affairs. Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York". absolutearts.com. May 26, 2005. Accessed November 16, 2012.
Describing himself as an 8½-year-old in the prose piece "91 Revere Street", Lowell wrote that he was "thick-witted, narcissistic, thuggish".Lowell, Robert. "91 Revere Street." Life Studies. New York: FSG, 1959. 28. 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.Mariani, Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996. p. 20. 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, Robert. "Caligula". For the Union Dead. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964. pp. 49–51. 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.Parker, Diantha. "Robert Lowell's Lightness", Poetry Magazine. November 25, 2010.
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 John Keats 'Hyperion', the first version, and I thought all of that was sublime."Brooks, Cleanth and Robert Penn Warren. "Robert Lowell." Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1988. p. 38.
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 traveled to Nashville with Moore, who took Lowell to Tate's house. Lowell asked Tate if he could live with him and his wife, and Tate joked that if Lowell wanted to, Lowell could pitch a tent on Tate's lawn; Lowell then went to Sears to purchase a tent that he set up on Tate's lawn and lived in for two months.Voices and Visions Series on Lowell - http://www.learner.org/resources/series57.html?pop=yes&pid=601 Lowell called the act "a terrible piece of youthful callousness".
After spending time with the Tates in Nashville (and attending some classes taught by John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt), Lowell decided to leave Harvard. When Tate and John Crowe Ransom left Vanderbilt for Kenyon College in Ohio, Lowell followed them and resumed his studies there, majoring in Classics, in which he earned an A.B., summa cum laude. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa his junior year and was valedictorian of his class. He settled into the so-called "writer's house" (a dorm that received its nickname after it had accrued several ambitious young writers) with fellow students Peter Taylor, Robie Macauley and Randall Jarrell.
Partly in rebellion against his parents, Lowell converted from Episcopalianism to Catholicism, and was for a time an editor at the Catholic publishing house Sheed and Ward. Robert Lowell @ Poets.org He corresponded with literary critic, poet, and Catholic nun M. Bernetta Quinn. 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.
While at Yaddo in 1949 Lowell became involved in the Red Scare and accused then director, Elizabeth Ames, of harboring communists and being romantically involved with another resident, Agnes Smedley. If Ames were not fired immediately, Lowell vowed to "blacken the name of Yaddo as widely as possible" using his connections in the literary sphere and Washington. The Yaddo board voted to drop all charges against Ames. Lowell's letter to the president was his first major political act of protest, but it would not be his last. During the mid to late 1960s, Lowell actively opposed the Vietnam War.
In response to American air raids in Vietnam in 1965, Lowell rejected an invitation to the White House Festival of the Arts from President Lyndon Johnson in a letter that he subsequently published in The New York Times, stating, "We are in danger of imperceptibly becoming an explosive and suddenly chauvinistic nation, and may even be drifting on our way to the last nuclear ruin."Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography, Faber & Faber, 1982, p. 322. Ian Hamilton notes that "throughout 1967, Lowell was in demand as a speaker and petition signer against. 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."Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography, Faber & Faber, 1982, p. 362 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. Norman Mailer, who was also a featured speaker at the rally, introduced Lowell to the crowd of protesters. Mailer described the peace march and his impression of Lowell that day in the early sections of his non-fiction novel The Armies of the Night.Mailer, Norman. The Armies of the Night. New York: New American Library, 1968. 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.Barsky, Robert F. Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1998. <>
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.Mariani, Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996, p. 362.
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.
Scholar Helen Vendler attended one of Lowell's poetry courses and wrote that one of the best aspects of Lowell's informal style was that he talked about poets in class as though "the poets being were friends or acquaintances". Hamilton quoted students who stated that Lowell "taught 'almost by indirection', 'he turned every poet into a version of himself', and 'he told stories about as if they were the latest news.'"Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography, Faber & Faber, 1982. p. 352
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." Time Cover "The Poets: A Second Chance." No Author listed. Time Magazine. June 2, 1967. 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 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. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Ed. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008. xviii 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, Robert. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2003.Lowell, Robert. Collected Prose. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1987.Travisano, Thomas. "Introduction." Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008. xviii.
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, Robert. Letters. "To Randall Jarrell." October 11, 1957. NY: FS&G, 2005. 296.
Lowell's first book of poems, Land of Unlikeness (1944) was also highly influenced by Lowell's conversion to Catholicism, leading Tate to call Lowell "a Catholic poet" in his introduction to the volume.Tate, Allen. "Introduction." The Land of Unlikeness. Cummington Press, 1944. 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.Mariani, Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. 119.
In 1946, Lowell received wide acclaimJarrell, Randall. "From the Kingdom of Necessity." No Other Book: Selected Essays. HarperCollins, 1999. p. 208-215.Bogan, Louise. "Books." The New Yorker. November 30, 1946.Warren, Austin. "A Double Discipline." Poetry, August 1947.Mariani, Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. 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.
Randall Jarrell gave Lord Weary's Castle high praise, writing, "It is unusually difficult to say which are the best poems in Lord Weary's Castle: several are realized past changing, successes that vary only in scope and intensity--others are poems that almost any living poet would be pleased to have written ... and one or two of these poems, I think, will be read as long as men remember English."
Following soon after his success with Lord Weary's Castle, Lowell served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1947 to 1948 (a position now known as the U.S. Poet Laureate).
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. It marked both a turning point in Lowell's career and a turning point for American poetry in general. Because many of the poems documented details from Lowell's family life and personal problems, one critic, Macha Rosenthal, labeled these poems "confessional" in a review of Life Studies that first appeared in The Nation magazine.Rosenthal, M. L. "Poetry as Confession." Our Life in Poetry: Selected Essays and Reviews. Persea Books: New York, 1991. 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.Bidart, Frank, editor. (2003) "On Confessional Poetry." Robert Lowell Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. p. 997. 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.
Also in 1961, Lowell published his English translation of the French verse play Phèdre by 17th century playwright Jean Racine. Lowell changed the spelling of the title of the play to Phaedra. This translation was Lowell's first attempt at translating a play, and the piece received a generally positive review from The New York Times. Broadway director and theater critic Harold Clurman wrote that Lowell's Phaedra was "a close paraphrase of Racine with a slightly Elizabethan tinge; it nevertheless renders a great deal of the excitement--if not the beauty--which exists in the original." Clurman accepted Lowell's contention that he wrote his version in a meter reminiscent of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and while Clurman conceded that the feel of Lowell's version was very different from the feel of French verse, Clurman considered it to be like "a finely fiery English poem," particularly in passages where "Lowell's muse took flame from Racine's shade."Clurman, Harold. "Ignorance is a Betrayal of Pleasure." The New York Times 28 May 1961. BR5. 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."Doherty, Paul. "The Poet as Historian: 'For The Union Dead' by Robert Lowell." Concerning Poetry 1.2 (Fall 1968).Williamson, Alan. Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell . Yale University Press, 1974. Helen Vendler states that the title poem in the collection "honors not only the person of the Robert Gould Shaw, but also the stern and beautiful memorial bronze bas-relief depicting ... which stands opposite the Boston State House."Vendler, Helen. The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995), 13-17. 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."Hayes, Paula. Robert Lowell and the Confessional Voice. New York: Peter Lang, 2013. p. 23. 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. Lowell also wrote about a number of world historical figures in poems like "Caligula," "Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts," and "Lady Raleigh's Lament," and he combined personal and public concerns in poems like the title poem and "Fall 1961" which addressed Lowell's fear of nuclear war during the height of the Cold War.
In 1964, Lowell also wrote three one-act plays that were meant to be performed together as a trilogy, titled The Old Glory. The first two parts, "Endecott the Red Cross" and "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" were stage adaptations of short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the third part, "Benito Cereno," was a stage adaptation of a Benito Cereno by Herman Melville. The Old Glory was produced off-Broadway at the American Place Theatre in New York City in 1964 and directed by Jonathan Miller. It won five Obie Awards in 1965 including an award for "Best American Play." Publisher's play synopsis Obie Awards for 1965 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")Hamilton, Ian. Robert Lowell: A Biography, Faber & Faber, 1982. p 327. 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."
During 1967 and 1968, Lowell experimented with a verse journal, first published as Notebook 1967-68 (and later republished in a revised and expanded edition, titled Notebook). Lowell referred to these fourteen-line poems as sonnets although they sometimes failed to incorporate regular meter and rhyme (both of which are defining features of the sonnet form); however, some of Lowell's sonnets (particularly the ones in Notebook 1967-1968) were written in blank verse with a definitive pentameter and a small handful also included rhyme. Regarding the issue of meter in these poems, Lowell wrote "My meter, fourteen line unrhymed blank verse sections, is fairly strict at first and elsewhere, but often corrupts in single lines to the freedom of prose."Lowell, Robert. Notebook 1967-1968. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. New York: 1968. p. 160.
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:
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.In this same "Afterthought" section, Lowell acknowledges some of his source materials for the poems, writing, "I have taken from many books, used the throwaway conversational inspirations of my friends, and much more that I idly spoke to myself." Some of the sources and authors he cites include Jesse Glenn Gray's The Warriors, Simone Weil's Half a Century Gone, Herbert Marcuse, Aijaz Ahmad, R. P. Blackmur, Plutarch, Stonewall Jackson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Steven Gould Axelrod wrote that, "Lowell's was to achieve the balance of freedom and order, discontinuity and continuity, that he had observed in [Wallace Stevens's]] late long poems and in John Berryman's Dream Songs, then nearing completion. He hoped that his form ... would enable him 'to describe the immediate instant,' an instant in which political and personal happenings interacted with a lifetime's accumulation of memories, dreams, and knowledge."Axelrod, Steven Gould, Robert Lowell: Life and Art, Princeton University Press, 1978. Retrieved from Poetry Foundation bio on Lowell 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. The play was directed by Jonathan Miller, who had previously directed Lowell's The Old Glory, at the Yale School of Drama.Fergusson, Fracis. "Prometheus at Yale." New York Review of Books. 1967.
A minor controversy erupted when Lowell admitted to having incorporated (and altered) private letters from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick into poems for The Dolphin. He was particularly criticized for this by his friends Adrienne RichAxelrod. Stephen. "Lowell's Comeback?" The New England Quarterly Vol. 77, No. 2. June 2004. and Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop presented Lowell with an argument against publishing The Dolphin. In a letter to Lowell regarding The Dolphin, dated March 21, 1972, before he'd published the book, Bishop praised the writing, saying, "Please believe that I think it is wonderful poetry." But then she stated, "I'm sure my point is only too plain ... Lizzie Hardwick is not dead, etc.--but there is a 'mixture of fact & fiction' in, and you have changed Hardwick's letters. That is 'infinite mischief,' I think ... One can use one's life as material--one does anyway--but these letters--aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permission--IF you hadn't changed them ... etc. But art just isn't worth that much." Words in Air: the Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Ed. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008. pp. 707-708. Adrienne Rich responded to the controversy quite differently. Instead of sending Lowell a private letter on the matter, she publicly criticized Lowell and his books The Dolphin and To Lizzie and Harriet in a review that appeared in the American Poetry Review and that effectively ended the two poets' long-standing friendship.Spivack, Kathleen. With Robert Lowell and His Circle. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2012. Rich called the poems "cruel and shallow."Mariani, Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996. 423.
Lowell's sonnets from the Notebook poems through to The Dolphin met with mixed responses upon publication, and critical consensus on the poems continues to be mixed. Some of Lowell's contemporaries, like Derek Walcott and William Meredith, praised the poems. Meredith wrote about Notebook: 1967–68, "Complex and imperfect, like most of the accomplishments of serious men and women today, Robert Lowell's Notebook 1967–68 is nevertheless a beautiful and major work."Meredith, William. "Notebook 1967-68." The New York Times. 15 June 1969. p. BR1. But a review of History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin by Calvin Bedient in The New York Times was mostly negative. Bedient wrote, "Inchoate and desultory, the poems never accumulate and break in the great way, like a waterfall seen from the lip, more felt than seen. In truth, they are under no pressure to go anywhere, except to the 14th line. Prey to random associations, they are full of false starts, fractures, distractions."Bedient, Calvin. "Visions and Revisions-Three New Volumes by America's First Poet." The New York Times. 29 July 1973. p. BR15. The sonnets also received a negative review by William Pritchard in the Hudson Review. Since the release of Lowell's Collected Poems in 2003, a number of critics and poets have praised the sonnets, including Michael Hofmann, William Logan, and Richard Tillinghast (though Logan and Hofmann note that they both strongly preferred the original Notebook versions of the sonnets over the revised versions that Lowell published in History and To Lizzie and Harriet). Still the sonnet volumes have received recent negative responses as well. In an otherwise glowing review of Lowell's Collected Poems, A.O. Scott wrote, "The three sonnet sequences Lowell published in 1973 ... occupy nearly 300 pages, and reading them, one damn sonnet after the other, induces more stupor than rapture."AO Scott's Collected Poems review on Slate Life's Study: Why Robert Lowell is America's most important career poet". Slate magazine. June 20, 2003. And in her review of the Collected Poems, Marjorie Perloff called the sonnet poems "trivial and catty," considering them to be Lowell's least important volumes.
Lowell published his last volume of poetry, Day by Day, in 1977, the year of his death. In May 1977, Lowell won the $10,000 National Medal for Literature awarded by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, Lowell's obit in NY Times 9/13/1977 and Day by Day was awarded that year's National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. In a documentary on Lowell, Anthony Hecht said that "''Day a very touching, moving, gentle book, tinged with a sense of Lowell's own pain and the pain he'd given to others."Voices and Visions Video Series. Robert Lowell. 1988. It was Lowell's only volume to contain nothing but free verse. In many of the poems, Lowell reflects on his life, his past relationships, and his own mortality. The best-known poem from this collection is the last one, titled "Epilogue," in which Lowell reflects upon the "confessional" school of poetry with which his work was associated. In this poem he wrote,
But sometimes everything I writeIn her article "Intimacy and Agency in Robert Lowell's ''Day by Day''," Reena Sastri notes that critical response to the book has been mixed, stating that during the initial publication of the book, some critics considered the book "a failure" while other critics, like Helen Vendler and Marjorie Perloff, considered it a success. She also notes that in reviews of Lowell's ''Collected Poems'' in 2003, ''Day by Day'' received mixed responses or was ignored by reviewers. Sastri herself argues that the book is under-appreciated and misunderstood.Sastri, Reena. [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cli/summary/v050/50.3.sastri.html "Intimacy and Agency in Robert Lowell's Day by Day."] Contemporary Literature Volume 50, Number 3, Fall 2009 pp. 461-495 The book has received significant critical attention from Helen Vendler who has written about the book in essays and in her book ''Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill'' (2010). In her essay "Robert Lowell's Last Days and Last Poems," she defended the book from attacks following its publication in reviews like the one written by the poet [[Donald Hall]] in which Hall called the book a failure, writing that he thought the book was "as slack and meretricious as ''Notebook'' and ''History'' which preceded it."Hall, Donald. [http://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=6169 "Robert Lowell and the Literature Industry."] PN Review 8, Volume 5. July–September 1979. Retrieved from www.pnreview.co.ukVendler, Helen, "Robert Lowell's Last Days and Last Poems." ''Robert Lowell: A Tribute''. Edited by Rolando Anzilotti. Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1979. 156-171. Vendler argued that most critics of the book were disappointed because Lowell's last book was so much different from any of his previous volumes, abandoning ambitious metaphors and political engagement for more personal snapshots. She wrote, "Now [Lowell] has ended [his career], in ''Day by Day'', as a writer of disarming openness, exposing shame and uncertainty, offering almost no purchase to interpretation, and in his journal-keeping, abandoning conventional structure, whether rhetorical or logical. The poems drift from one focus to another; they avoid the histrionic; they sigh more often than they expostulate. They acknowledge exhaustion; they expect death." She praises some of Lowell's descriptions, particularly of [[impotence]], depression, and [[old age]].
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?Lowell, Robert. ''Collected Poems''. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2003. p. 838.
Lowell's Collected Poems, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, was published in 2003. The Collected Poems was a very comprehensive volume that included all of Lowell's major works with the exception of Notebook 1967-1968 and Notebook. However, many of the poems from these volumes were republished, in revised forms, in History and For Lizzie and Harriet. Soon after the publication of The Collected Poems, The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton, was published in 2005. Both Lowell's Collected Poems and his Letters received positive critical responses from the mainstream press. "The Passions of Robert Lowell" June 26, 2005 New York Times. Accessed September 18, 2010 Collected Poems:The Whole Lowell June 29, 2003 New York Times. Accessed September 18, 2010 Life's Study: Why Robert Lowell is America's most important career poet". Slate magazine. June 20, 2003. Accessed September 18, 2010
Lowell's Memoirs, including a previously unpublished youthful diary, were edited by Steven Axelrod and Grzegorz Kość in 2022. (2025). 9780374258924, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374258924
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.Collins-Hughes, Laura. "Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell's Letters." Boston Globe. November 23, 2012. Accessed from onstage Ruhl used Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell as the basis for her play.Graham, Ruth. "Lettering the Stage." Retrieved from www.poetryfoundation.org
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.Hayes, Dade. Review: Scorsese Hits the Books with HBO's The 50 Year Argument. Retrieved from www.forbes.com
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