Lowell, Robert (Vol. 5) - Lowell, Robert 1917–
Lowell, Robert 1917–
Poet, playwright, translator, critic, and man of letters, Lowell is one of America's most outstanding writers. All of his work reflects the complex tension between his Puritan New England background and his mature conversion to Catholicism. Donald Hall, himself a distinguished poet and scholar, has written that Lowell "has the potential to become the major poet in English of the last half of this century, as Yeats … was the major poet of the first half." (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 9-12, rev. ed.)
Viewed as a whole, Lowell's treatment of American history [in The Old Glory, three plays] presents a tangle of tonalities, his varying attitudes sometimes jarring against each other in a single poem or in different versions of the same poem. His feelings about the past have been in a state of flux throughout his career, history intersecting with self in a shifting drama. That self has been immersed in an...
[The entire page is 4599 words long]
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