Throughout his lifetime, Robert Lowell was intrigued by or even obsessed with the visual arts. It was a preoccupation that started during his school days at St. Mark’s and lasted to the final poem of the last volume he published, “Epilogue,” his ode to painter Johannes Vermeer. This chapter investigates what this passion about especially painting reveals about his writing. Lowell admired and was envious of Old Master painters and sought to emulate their gaze at the world through language. He was more suspicious of photography and contemporary art, although he wrote amply about those art forms as well. By zooming in on Lowell’s creative process and his idiosyncratic revision process of two case studies – “Cranach’s Man-Hunt” and “Misanthrope and Painter” – it becomes apparent that Lowell used the visual arts to consider how he thought about his chosen art form and profession, and how he thought about the world.

This chapter concerns Lowell’s years in England and Ireland, his divorce from Elizabeth Hardwick, and third marriage to Lady Caroline Blackwood. It focuses on the controversy around the publication of The Dolphin (1973), which deals with these matters and damaged his reputation. It also concerns Lowell’s state of mind, his health, and his interaction with British university life and British poetry, although these were of less pressing concern to him than his relationships and his fierce commitment to his own poetry. The chapter begins with Lowell as a temporarily jaded public figure leaving America to take creative respite in England. During his time here, he reworks his Notebook to produce History and For Lizzie and Harriet, while newer sonnets appear in The Dolphin. Despite the more warmly received Day by Day (1977), the chaos in his marriage leads him to return to America and Hardwick, where he dies at age sixty.

Denominational identity, though poorly understood in theological terms, was socially decisive to postwar Americans. Lowell’s lifelong preoccupation with religion took the form of an ostentatious Catholicism in the 1940s, influenced his conscientious objection to World War II, and helps explain his poems about Jonathan Edwards. Paul Mariani discussed Lowell as a “Lost Puritan,” while Kay Jamison investigated the proximity of madness and faith as “states of possession,” and Elisa New sees a “visionary” impulse in the poet. Milton and Hopkins stimulated Lowell’s poetry as much as questions of ethics troubled it. Lowell’s religious temperament remained permanently alert, calling into questions fossilized distinctions between early and late Lowell. Its recognition and contextualization provides interpretive access to his monologues and family portraits from Mills of the Kavanaughs to Life Studies, resurfacing wistfully in Day by Day.

In this chapter, Lowell and Language poets are juxtaposed as opposite interpretations of historical impulses fueling twentieth-century American poetics: modernism and Romanticism. While the poetic culture that elevated Lowell to esteem interpreted those traditions as an injunction to seek the poetic in the authenticity of the personal subjecthood, Language poetry aimed to radically disrupt the entire paradigm. Proposing a unique amalgam of theory and practice, Charles Bernstein, Barrett Watten, or Ron Silliman treated theory as a provocation to revisit the common ground of philosophy and poetry. As such, it was an attempt at rejuvenating the encounter of word and world in order to regain access to the political plasticity of an autobiographical subject’s life. The chapter shows how this paragon of the lyric is fascinatingly revised by such poets as Bernstein, Hejinian, Armantrout, or Peter Gizzi.

“Elizabeth Bishop” explores the close and lifelong personal and artistic relationship that sustained Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop from their first meeting in 1947 until Lowell’s death in 1977. Lowell dedicated his influential “Skunk Hour” to Bishop, and Bishop dedicated her own “The Armadillo” to Lowell. Bishop’s “North Haven” is widely considered the most eloquent of the many elegies addressed to Lowell. Over their thirty years of friendship, Lowell’s and Bishop’s lives became woven together in a vast and intricate web of words. This chapter explores their complex emotional bond, their influence on one another as poets, and the fluent exchange of correspondence, later published as Words in Air, that kept them going. The essay argues that in part through his friendship with Bishop, Lowell learned to master an art that, in the words of one of his poetic tributes to Bishop, could “make the casual perfect.”

Robert Lowell’s influence has been pervasive. Two features of his writing, in particular, have been widely adopted and adapted: photographic imagery and the practice of quoting. Lowell’s photographic realism is the central trope in his autobiographical writing, and it became a lingua franca of the confessional and post-confessional poem in general. The influence appears in such later poets as Sylvia Plath, Robert Hayden, Li-Young Lee, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, and Frank Bidart. Lowell’s practice of inserting quoted texts and conversational tidbits by others within his own imaginative structures is a second highly influential feature of his writing. His method of sampling influenced or aligns with the work of such later poets as Bidart, Henri Cole, and Claudia Rankine. Lowell’s use of mimetic repetition (the photograph, the quote) continue to resonate in the way we write poetry and read it.

After a short discussion of the actual typescripts and manuscripts of Lowell’s letters, this chapter centers on the published books of letters, which have become a central, rewarding part of Lowell’s oeuvre. On the level of style, Lowell’s letters can help us hear the poems better: above all, they make audible the comic tones under-recognized in his poetry. On the level of content, the letters shed light on Lowell’s literary contexts, his interests, and his thinking in specific poems: When Lowell writes to other poets about their work, he frequently reveals quite a bit about his own. And finally, the letters create an autobiography that encompasses gossip, complaint, apology, argument, critique, and confession.

Throughout his career, Robert Lowell showed an immense respect and admiration for T. S. Eliot. The friendship between the two writers and the importance of Eliot’s example as a poet are well documented in Lowell’s letters and essays, as well as in poems written under Eliot’s potent influence. Eliot’s rendering of speech, his ironic intelligence, his adoption of myth and symbol, and his liberal use of quotation and allusion all find their way into Lowell’s poetry. At the same time, as this chapter reveals, there are some significant diversions and differences of opinion. Lowell perseveres in writing a poetry that is impersonal in the manner prescribed by Eliot, while also drawing on subject matter that is candidly autobiographical. One of the key points in the chapter is that Lowell acknowledged Eliot as a "confessional" poet several years before the term was applied to his own compositions in Life Studies. Although the two poets have much in common in terms of their theological interests, they also differ profoundly in their views on questions of sin, death, and salvation.

Robert Lowell both resisted and embraced the mantle of public poet. One way of tracking this ambivalence in Lowell’s poetics is by following the developments in his war poems. Though Lowell, along with Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill, is credited with pivoting poetry from the mannered verse culture of the 1950s to the autobiographical experiments of the 1960s, more recent appraisals of Lowell find a complicated grappling with whiteness and with overlapping historical and personal selves. The events of Lowell’s biography provide one rich context for thinking about his poetry’s treatment of war. Yet war is not only the near-constant background for Lowell’s life and the theater for his political engagement. It is also a spur to Lowell’s incessant revision of his poetic methods and commitments to verse forms. Focusing on war helps to bring Lowell’s prosodic changes into relief.

The chapter explores Lowell’s awareness of Boston’s complex class-marked topography. The Beacon Hill has become only a shorthand term for an anachronistically elite neighborhood, and we have become oblivious to the significance of its specific addresses. The Hill, however, was always intricately zoned and stratified, riven with class and ethnic conflict. Lowell’s story of his family moving from house to house within the Beacon Hill and then further and further east down the Back Bay is a dramatic story of social decline. The chapter also looks, in Lowell’s poetry and prose, for traces of the analogous class conflict over the downtown Boston’s public green spaces. The Lowells found themselves first “on the wrong side” of the Beacon Hill, then in the less prestigious section of the Back Bay impinged upon by the lesser castes. They enjoyed their leisure in the manicured Public Garden whose serenity was threatened by the messy, plebeian, enclosure-resisting Common.

Due in part to Claudia Rankine’s invocation of Robert Lowell’s poetry in Citizen: An American Lyric (2015), readers have begun to stress the poet’s status as the representative “of a (mostly white, mostly male) post-Romantic lyric tradition,” as Kamran Javadizadeh puts it. Rankine’s presentation of Lowell as a racial artist invites criticism not only to acknowledge racist dimensions of his poetics, but also to consider Lowell’s unusual interest in exploring the emotional contours of his own concept of whiteness. This chapter explores how forms of entitlement, anxiety, and desirous identification with non-white others coexist alongside Lowell’s attempts to reckon with the white supremacist undercurrents that shaped his family history, his social formation, and his earliest articulations of self. This complex coexistence generates a striking pattern in Lowell’s literary configurations of whiteness in terms of suspended states of liminal awareness: confusion, shadowy recollection, and the vague annunciations of dreams.