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Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell Poems
| 1. | Harpo Marx | 6/12/2015 |
| 2. | July In Washington | 3/26/2015 |
| 3. | Water | 11/24/2014 |
| 4. | Falling Asleep Over The Aeneid | 4/8/2010 |
| 5. | Sailing Home From Rapallo | 4/8/2010 |
| 6. | My Last Afternoon With Uncle Devereux Winslow | 4/8/2010 |
| 7. | Mr. Edwards And The Spider | 4/8/2010 |
| 8. | After The Surprising Conversions | 4/8/2010 |
| 9. | To Speak Of Woe That Is In Marriage | 1/3/2003 |
| 10. | Homecoming | 1/3/2003 |
| 11. | Home After Three Months Away | 1/3/2003 |
| 12. | The Drunken Fisherman | 1/3/2003 |
| 13. | Dolphin | 1/3/2003 |
| 14. | Memories Of West Street And Lepke | 1/3/2003 |
| 15. | Waking In The Blue | 1/3/2003 |
| 16. | Epilogue | 1/3/2003 |
| 17. | The Quaker Graveyard In Nantucket | 1/3/2003 |
| 18. | History | 1/3/2003 |
| 19. | Man And Wife | 1/3/2003 |
| 20. | For The Union Dead | 1/3/2003 |
| 21. | Children Of Light | 1/3/2003 |
| 22. | Skunk Hour | 1/3/2003 |
| 23. | "To Speak Of Woe That Is In Marriage&Quot; | 1/20/2003 |
| 24. | The Old Flame | 1/3/2003 |
Comments about Robert Lowell
The Old Flame
My old flame, my wife!
Remember our lists of birds?
One morning last summer, I drove
by our house in Maine. It was still
on top of its hill -
Now a red ear of Indian maize
was splashed on the door.
Old Glory with thirteen stripes
hung on a pole. The clapboard
was old-red schoolhouse red.
Inside, a new landlord,
a new wife, a new broom!
Atlantic seaboard antique shop
pewter and plunder
shone in each room.
A new frontier!
No running next door
now to phone the sheriff
for his taxi to Bath
and the State Liquor Store!
No ...
History
History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had--
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.
Abel was finished; death is not remote,
a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic,
his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire,
his baby crying all night like a new machine.
As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory,
He is considered by many critics to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century.
His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (Harcourt, Brace and Company,1944) and Lord Weary’s Castle (Harcourt, Brace and Company,1946) , for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947 at the age of thirty, were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America’s Puritan legacy.
Lowell was politically involved: he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War (was imprisoned as a result) , and actively protested against the war in Vietnam. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.
Partly in response to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-1950s began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form.
The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (Faber and Faber,1959) , which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, much as Eliot‘s The Waste Land had three decades before.
the poem is not correct. the last three stanzas are from Elizabeth Bishop's 'The Armadillo.' get it together whoever runs this site.