More than one hundred years have passed since Robert Lowell’s birth in 1917. For today’s readers, the period of time in which Lowell was active – the middle portion of the twentieth century – is increasingly remote. Concepts like “Cold War,” “Vietnam,” or “Watergate” get their respective paragraphs in the history books, while figures like Robert Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy are increasingly known only to specialists. That Boston once had a quasi-aristocratic class may be amusing now. Concepts of race and gender were challenged politically and institutionally in Lowell’s lifetime but have now become ingredients of an active and controversial discourse of constant self-positioning. All these matters are relevant to a contextually informed reading of Robert Lowell’s poetry.

Lowell’s intense creative engagement with Herman Melville was long-standing, evident from his first published poetry (notably and specifically in "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket") to his last works, particularly his trilogy of verse dramas The Old Glory. Tracking Melville in Lowell is relatively straightforward in terms of allusion, but there are deeper and more significant traits that the two writers shared. Both are Miltonic in terms of their literary and intellectual heritage, both reflect on the legacy of New England; on guilt, violence, power and the imagining of the United States. The Old Glory includes Lowell’s dramatic verse refiguring of Benito Cereno where the 1855 novella is aligned with key public and political themes of the 1960s: racial inequality and unrest; the cold war; American nuclear capability. These have a disturbing and discomforting resonance in our own times, and usefully remind us of Lowell as a public and political poet.

This chapter aims to locate an emergent eco-consciousness in the poetry of Robert Lowell. It argues that in Life Studies and beyond, Lowell’s poetry explores the political production of uncertainty, and considers how anxiety was employed as a political tool used to enforce vigilance and compliance. In poems addressing the prospect of nuclear war, Lowell positions this production of anxiety as a biopolitical process aimed at both managing resistance to nuclear politics and normalizing the fallout – both literal and figurative – from US political, military, and industrial interests in atomic technologies. From an ecocritical perspective, Lowell’s poems demonstrate how, in the nuclear age, the Cold War state renders the natural environment an object of government control. Both the real and the psychological fallout of the atomic age are a prescient ecological threat predicated upon a cruel optimism that conditions Cold War subjects to be complicit in their own ecological ruin.

This chapter examines some of the ways in which Lowell’s poetry engages with the US presidency and with the legacies of individual presidents. With the exception of John F. Kennedy, Lowell was critical of those who held office during his lifetime – and even his feelings about Kennedy were ambivalent. However, Lowell – himself from political stock – also felt an affinity with those in power. His poetry, especially in History, documents his own forays into the public world of campaigning and specifically his relationships with Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. Through its simultaneous expressions of fascination and revulsion when it comes to the exercise of power, Lowell’s poetry also confronts some of the moral conundrums of American history. The essay concludes with a brief discussion of presidential speech-making and what this might have to do with lyric poetry.

Evocations of Classical Greece and Rome pervade Robert Lowell’s entire oeuvre. His fascination with Latin literature in particular shaped his own poetry. The density and involved syntax of Virgil and Propertius are echoed in the crabbed and tortured involutions of Lowell’s earlier poetry. His confessional verse is in part a response to Catullan frankness. His view of America as declining from republic into empire was colored by the historiography of Suetonius and Tacitus, in whose portraits of imperial tyrants Lowell found a frame for depicting the darker elements of his own character. He essayed many (usually very free) translations or versions of Greek and Roman poems, often with autobiographical inflections. A number of “original” poems can be shown to have originated as translations from Catullus, Virgil, Propertius, or Horace. In contrast with his almost obsessive engagement with Roman literature, Lowell’s engagement with Greek was less extensive, often mediated through later European literature, and (notably in his versions of Aeschylus) less vivid.

The recent wave of visual material studies in modernist poetics warrants renewed consideration of the means by which Lowell engaged, resisted, and reflected on photographic practices. Lowell’s photographic modes vary with shifting styles and subjects. Early in his career, Lowell invokes photographs and snapshots as material artifacts in portrait and self-portrait genres. In this mode, the surface of the photograph collects descriptive details that rhetorically situate the “record of a life” as one that, Lowell insists, must be believed to be “true,” and “real,”although obviously manipulated. Photography also functions as a metaphor for putting the photographic looking “on stage” to examine different ways of seeing. In later work, epistemologies of photography become models for the action of poetic autobiography and for performances of writing. Connections between photography and poetic practice are considered in autobiographical prose and major poems in Life Studies, For the Union Dead, and Day by Day.

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.