Lowell, Robert [Traill Spence, Jr.]
Lowell, Robert [Traill Spence, Jr.]( 1917–77),grandson of the 19th-century poet and novelist of the same name and member of the prominent Boston family, was himself reared in Boston, as frankly described in Life Studies, and educated at Harvard and at Kenyon College. The year of his graduation (1940) was also marked by his marriage to his first wife, the writer Jean Stafford (he was later married—1949–72—to the novelist Elizabeth Hardwick), and his conversion to Catholicism. During World War II he was refused the status of a conscientious objector and was jailed. His poetry, first published in Land of Unlikeness (1944), is marked by themes of rebellion, depiction of corruption and chaos in the modern world, and quest for spiritual values in his adopted faith. A baroque intensity continues in his later poems collected in Lord Weary's Castle (1946, Pulitzer Prize), The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951), and For the...
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