Form and Continuity: Lovell's latest problems

Extract

Robert Lowell was born in Boston in 1917. He was descended from early New England colonists, and after a childhood on Beacon Hll, he went to St. Mark’s School and then on to Harvard, where he matriculated, but transferred after a year to Kenyon College. There he majored in classics and became a pupil of John Crowe Ransom. In 1940 he became a Catholic convert. Although Lowell attempted to enlist in the navy after the beginning of World War II he later protested against the Allied bombing of the civilian population of European cities and as a result of his failure to obey the Selective Service Act he was sentenced to a year and a day in a Federal prison. He was released after five months and in the following year, 1944, there appeared his first book of poems, Land of Unlikeness.

Since that time Lowell’s status as a poet and a public spokesman (the two became undistinguishable) has never ceased to grow. Lowell has acquired an extraordinary power as the private man made public, the tormented citizen whose personal struggles and griefs seem fatally enmeshed with the course of twentieth century history. When the poet turned down L. B. Johnson’s White House invitation as a protest against American policy in S.E. Asia it was not only the President who expressed concern. Lowell has made himself into an archetype, living through the contradictions inherent in his society, tom between the need for a domestic and artistic privacy, and the forces that impel him to a public commitment.