Robert Lowell

Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (Boston, 1917 - New York, 1977) was one of the most influential American poets of the postwar years. He came from a Boston Brahmin family that traced its roots to the Mayflower, and he wrote in English. His poetry keeps returning to the history of his lineage and to life in New England, which is why he remains a key reference for understanding mid-twentieth-century American verse.

Lowell attended St. Mark's School and then Harvard, though he left after two unhappy years. He trained under Allen Tate in Nashville and finished his degree at Kenyon College, graduating in Classics in 1940. During the Second World War he refused military service as a conscientious objector and spent several months in prison in Danbury, Connecticut, an episode he explained in a letter to President Roosevelt.

He wrote in both metrical verse and free verse, often in forms that sit somewhere between the two. Life Studies (1959) won the National Book Award in 1960 and made him a central figure of confessional poetry, although much of his output does not fit that label neatly, since he freely blended the public and the personal. He received two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, in 1947 and 1974, and served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1947 to 1948.

His legacy lies in joining family history to public affairs and in renewing the autobiographical and narrative poem. His biographer Paul Mariani called him the last of America's influential public poets.