Lowell, Robert (Vol. 1) - Lowell, Robert 1917–
Lowell, Robert 1917–
A major American poet, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1947, Lowell is also a playwright and translator. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 9-10.)
[No] one younger than Auden has written better poetry than the best of Robert Lowell's, it seems to me….
Underneath all these poems "there is one story and one story only"; when this essential theme or subject is understood, the unity of attitudes and judgments underlying the variety of the poems becomes startlingly explicit. The poems understand the world as a sort of conflict of opposites. In this struggle one opposite is that cake of custom in which all of us lie embedded like lungfish—the [stasis] or inertia of the stubborn self, the obstinate persistence in evil that is damnation. Into this realm of necessity the poems push everything that is closed, turned inward, incestuous, that blinds or binds: the Old Law, imperialism, militarism, capitalism, Calvinism,...
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