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117 Robert Lowell Ø According to D. H. Melham, “The Boy Died in My Alley” was inspired by several stories, one of them involving “a tragic shooting in Brooks’s neighborhood.” Kenneth Alexander, an honors student in the same high school class as Brooks’s daughter Nora, was killed as he ran from a policeman. Norris B. Clark, writing in A Life Distilled, suggests that the poem advocates “a sense of communal and individual responsibility for the spiritual and physical death of blacks.” ROBERT LOWELL 1917–1977 Robert lowell had a poetic career notable for its range and impact. Early poems, such as “Where the Rainbow Ends,” used complex formal structures to frame a quest for Christian redemption. In his middle period, he innovated a poetry of personal revelation, in such poems as “Skunk Hour,” and a poetry of social witness, in such poems as “For the Union Dead.” These poems are so powerful that Lowell is best remembered today as the poet who popularized “confessional poetry” and who gave poetry a political dimension. In his later work, such as “Epilogue,” he reflected on the complex interrelations between life and art. By exploring difficult private and public issues, Lowell helped recover poetry’s cultural centrality. An only child, Lowell was born and raised in Boston. Among his ancestors were various Puritan patriarchs and a few notable poets, including James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell. Despite these illustrious forebears, he grew up in a tense environment of declining income, social aspiration, and bitter conflict between his parents. Moreover, the family history itself was blemished: the patriarchs had committed brutal acts of war against Native Americans, and the family poets seemed to Lowell outdated. He grew up feeling ambivalent about history, family, and himself—the three topics that would drive his poetic career. After two unhappy years at Harvard, Lowell came under the wing of elder poet Allen Tate, and he transferred to Kenyon College, where he studied with another elder poet, John Crowe Ransom, and befriended fellow student and poet Randall Jarrell (included in this volume). After graduating, Lowell married Jean Stafford (a fiction writer) and converted to Roman Catholicism. When inducted into the army during World War II, he protested the bombing of civilian centers by refusing to serve. Sentenced to prison, he served five and a half months, emerging (as he later said) “educated—not as they wished re-educated.” Two years after his release in 1944, he published his first major volume, Lord Ø Robert Lowell 118 Weary’s Castle (1946), which won the Pulitzer Prize and established him as a leading poet of his generation. Jarrell observed that the book concerns a conflict between everything that blinds or binds and everything that grows or changes. This constant struggle informs “Where the Rainbow Ends,” in which Lowell’s vivid language produces moments of wrenching intensity. In the early 1950s, Lowell stopped writing poetry. He lost his faith, divorced and remarried, experienced the death of both parents, and began a series of mental breakdowns that would punctuate the rest of his life. By 1957 he was settled in Boston with his wife (literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick) and their infant daughter, and he was desperate to be writing again. Although ambivalent about Allen Ginsberg, he was impressed by the Beat poet’s success in communicating his vision. He also found inspiration in the lucidity of poems by William Carlos Williams (a new mentor), Elizabeth Bishop (his close friend), and Anne Sexton (one of his students). Influenced by all of these poets, he invented a new writing style that was both personal and exploratory. Such poems as “Commander Lowell,” “Waking in the Blue,” and “Skunk Hour” centered on private memories rather than historical and religious themes. They had the plot, character, and humor of autobiography. They juxtaposed ironic distance with disclosure, observation with introspection, and narrative with verbal complexity. When the poems were published in Life Studies (1959), they created a sensation. Lowell was reborn as a poet, and American poetry was pushed along toward its appointment with postmodernism. After the publication of these personal poems, Lowell moved with his family from Boston to New York, and he began to immerse himself again in the public sphere. “For the Union Dead” meditates on the disturbing presence of racism in American culture, while “Waking Early Sunday Morning” laments a present and future punctuated by “small war on the heels of small / war.” “For Robert Kennedy 1925–68” mourns the...

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