SOURCE: “The Creative Life,” in James Russell Lowell: Portrait of a Many-Sided Man, Oxford University Press, 1971, pp. 104-26.

In the following essay, Wagenknecht analyzes Lowell's literary aesthetic.

Be sure and don’t leave anything out because it seems trifling, for it is out of these trifles only that it is possible to reconstruct character.

JRL, to James T. Fields, 1871

I

Though Lowell never confined his activities to writing poetry, he still thought of himself as essentially a poet. He chose this goal for himself early in life, even while his father still regarded it as a species of vagabondage, and he planned a course of study in the laws of English verse preparatory to it. In his law office days he wrote,

They tell me I must study law, They say I have dreamed, and dreamed too long;                     That I must rouse and seek for fame and gold...