Biography EssayFor some readers and critics Robert Lowell stood at the center of his literary generation, and by the mid 1960s one admirer, Irvin Ehrenpreis, was referring to "The Age of Lowell." One ...
Read more
American poet Robert Trail Spence Lowell, Jr. (1917-1977) was one of the most highly esteemed and honored poets of his day. Many still acclaim his work for its mastery of diverse literary form, intens...
Read more
For some readers and critics the late Robert Lowell stood at the center of his literary generation, and by the mid-1960s one admirer, Irvin Ehrenpreis, was referring to "The Age of Lowell." One can se...
Read more
For some readers and critics Robert Lowell stood at the center of his literary generation, and by the mid 1960s one admirer, Irvin Ehrenpreis, was referring to "The Age of Lowell." One can see why. Lo...
Read more
Critical Essay by John Simon
[In The Old Glory] Lowell is trying to capture the ironies, cruelties and inconclusiveness on which America was built: in Endecott, the ambiguities are chiefly religious; ...
Read more
Critical Essay by Ruby Cohn
Lowell is the most gifted poet of his generation to turn to the stage. Like Schevill, he came to drama through translation, but the way was prepared by the dramatic turn of...
Read more
Critical Essay by Robert Fitzgerald
In Lowell's work I have always felt a giant pressure exerted on language and experience, not only in dense and highly wrought poems but in relatively convers...
Read more
Critical Essay by G. S. Fraser
Life Studies, [Lowell's] famous transitional volume, was welcomed by myself among other reviewers, for a new kind of direct ease: not, of course, as an ancestor o...
Read more
Critical Essay by David Kalstone
Historical judgment and public distance—the tone realized, for example, in "For the Union Dead"—are entangled with [Robert Lowell's]...
Read more
Critical Essay by Desmond Graham
All [Lowell's] intelligence, his understanding of shifting levels of experience and of language, led him to complexity but not to a reduction of scale or a rest...
Read more
Critical Essay by John Haffenden
Robert Lowell's career as a poet moderated or wavered between his natural inclination towards symbolic formalism and his courtship of confessional free verse...
Read more
Critical Essay by Fleur Adcock
Much of [Day by Day] is occupied by the title sequence, dedicated to [Lowell's] wife and tracing a period of their lives in separate but interrelated lyrics; but ...
Read more
Critical Essay by William Bedford
That Robert Lowell was always interested in formal experiment we may argue from the evidence of the poems. What I would like to suggest here is that this interest is ...
Read more
Critical Essay by Donald Hall
I had hoped that Robert Lowell, after the disastrous collections of recent years, would emerge into old age with energy and genius as Yeats had done. But when Lowell died...
Read more
Critical Essay by Sandra Prewitt Edelman
What, one wonders, would attract a poet to rewrite what is already a rewriting of a translation from the original Greek. For that is what Robert Lowell did wit...
Read more
Critical Essay by Robert Fitzgerald
The sheer size of what [Robert Lowell] did in verse exceeded the life work of any of his coevals, and I do not mean in bulk alone—also in scope and grasp and...
Read more
Critical Essay by Charles Altieri
The doctrine of incarnation has an inherent appeal to poetic thought because it promises to resolve the two basic forms of contradiction bred by a sense of the ironic...
Read more
Critical Essay by Erich Segal
Though he had written the first two-thirds of his Oresteia in the 1960s, Lowell was still working on the final portion when he died. His purpose, put forth in the brief p...
Read more
In the following essay, Druska provides an overview of Lowell's literary career, artistic development, and major themes in his poetry.
I. His Career
The speaker of Robert Lowell's ...
Read more
In the following essay, Doreski traces the creative evolution of "For the Union Dead" and offers alternative interpretations. According to Doreski, the poem "centers not in its pu...
Read more
In the following essay, Tillinghast discusses Lowell's death and offers critical evaluation of Day by Day.
To read Robert Lowell's last book, Day by Day, published shortly before his dea...
Read more
In the following essay, Flanzbaum discusses Lowell's literary fame, political protest, and critical reception during the 1960s. Flanzbaum contends that Lowell's public ambition "s...
Read more
In the following essay, Lane discusses Lowell's use of allusion and metaphorical reference in "Man and Wife," "Sailing Home from Rapollo," and "For the Union ...
Read more
In the following essay, Wallingford examines free associational thinking as an important element of Lowell's creative process. Wallingford notes that free association, a technique derived from ...
Read more
In the following review, Bogen offers positive evaluation of Lowell's Collected Prose.
Robert Lowell was probably the last American poet who might be described as formidable. His stylistic tran...
Read more
In the following review, Davie offers favorable assessment of Lowell's Collected Prose.
This may be Robert Lowell's most winning book. But Collected Prose should not be read straight thr...
Read more
In the following essay, Hammer examines Lowell's artistic break from the influence of Allen Tate and the significance of Lowell's nervous breakdown as a metaphor for this schism as evide...
Read more
In the following essay, Witek examines Lowell's search for personal identity and Freudian themes relating to his parents in the poetry of Life Studies and his autobiographical prose writings.
R...
Read more
In the following essay, Doreski explores Lowell's effort to reconcile his aesthetic attraction to warfare and moral objection to the Second World War in the poetry of Land of Unlikeness.
In 194...
Read more
In the following essay, Tillinghast provides an overview of Lowell's literary career, artistic development, and critical reception.
A meteorologist of late twentieth-century American poetry, no...
Read more