[New-Poetry] Re: laureate

[Anny Ballardini]

It seems that James is right, from Wikipedia the incredible ancestors of his mother, and his brief bio:

Robert Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a Boston Brahmin family that included the poets Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell. His mother, Charlotte Winslow, was a direct descendant of William Samuel Johnson, a signer of the United States Constitution, Jonathan Edwards, the famed philosopher, Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan preacher and healer, Robert Livingston the Elder, Thomas Dudley, the second governor of Massachusetts, and Mayflower passengers James Chilton and his daughter Mary Chilton. He was at St. Mark's School, a prominent prep-school in Southborough, Mass, before attending Harvard College for two years and transferring to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, to study under John Crowe Ransom.[1] He converted from Episcopalianism to Catholicism,[2] which influenced his first two books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and the Pulitzer Prize winning Lord Weary's Castle (1946). In 1950, Lowell was included in the influential anthology Mid-Century American Poets as one of the key literary figures of his generation. Among his contemporaries who also appeared in that book were Muriel Rukeyser, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, and John Ciardi, all poets who came into prominence in the 1940s.

Lowell was a conscientious objector during World War II and served several months at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. During the 1960s he was active in the civil rights movement and opposed the US involvement in Vietnam. His participation in the October 1967 peace march in Washington, DC, and his subsequent arrest are described in the early sections of Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night.

Lowell suffered with alcoholism and manic depression and was hospitalized many times throughout his life. He was married to novelist Jean Stafford from 1940 to 1948. In 1949 he married the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. In 1970 he left Elizabeth Hardwick for the British author Lady Caroline Blackwood. He spent many of his last years in England. Lowell died in 1977, having suffered a heart attack in a cab in New York City on his way to see Elizabeth Hardwick. He is buried in Stark Cemetery, Dunbarton, New Hampshire.

Lowell's collected poems were published in 2003 and his letters in 2005, leading to a renewed interest in his work.

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: jforjames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Monday, May 05, 2008 8:56 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: laureate




    even Lowell during Vietnam--he served one stint, in 1947-8).  


  --
  I didn't realize this. Wasn't Lowell a CO during WWII? That would've make him a controversial pick on the heels of the war years.
  Finnegan

 
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