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Page 1 of 2

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Thomas Austenfeld, University of Fribourg, Grzegorz Kość, University of Warsaw
  • Book:
    Robert Lowell In Context
    Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    04 April 2024, pp 1-8

  • Summary

    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.

  • Chapter 16 - Religion

  • from Part V - Life, Illness, and the Arts
  • Edited by Thomas Austenfeld, University of Fribourg, Grzegorz Kość, University of Warsaw
  • Book:
    Robert Lowell In Context
    Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    04 April 2024, pp 173-184

  • Summary

    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.

Robert Lowell In Context
  • Edited by Thomas Austenfeld, Grzegorz Kość
  • Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    04 April 2024
  • Robert Lowell was one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. This volume explores the various contexts of Lowell's life and work and evaluates his oeuvre from new perspectives. Individual chapters address his relation to the South, his religious evolution, aspects of his marriages and private life, his bipolar disorder seen through new theories of mental illness, his work as a letter writer and a connoisseur of art and photography. The book also introduces new parameters for a contemporary study of Lowell, commenting on current debates about race and privilege, feminism, ecoconsciousness, his engagement with the natural environment as well as his friendships with Randall Jarrell and Robert Penn Warren.

Robert Lowell in a New Century
  • European and American Perspectives
  • Edited by Thomas Austenfeld
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    26 June 2019
    Print publication:
    17 June 2019
  • New essays providing fresh insights into the great 20th-century American poet Lowell, his writings, and his struggles.

Page 1 of 2