Robert Lowell

On his father's side, Lowell was the great-great-grandson of Maj. Mordecai Myers (father of Theodorus Bailey Myers, Lowell's great-granduncle), a soldier in the War of 1812 and later mayor of Kinderhook and Schenectady; and on his mother's side, he was descended from the German-Jewish Mordecai family of Raleigh, North Carolina, who were prominent in state affairs.

As a youth, Lowell had a penchant for violence and bullying other children.

Describing himself as an 8½-year-old in the prose piece "91 Revere Street", Lowell wrote that he was "thick-witted, narcissistic, thuggish".

As a teenager, Lowell's peers gave him the nickname "Cal" after both the villainous Shakespeare character Caliban and the tyrannical Roman emperor Caligula, and the nickname stuck with him throughout his life.

The Lowells were a Boston Brahmin family that included poets Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell; clergymen Charles Russell Lowell Sr. and Robert Traill Spence Lowell; Civil War general and war hero Charles Russell Lowell III (about whom Lowell wrote his poem "Charles Russell Lowell: 1835-1864"); and the Federal Judge John Lowell.

His mother was a descendant of William Samuel Johnson, a signer of the United States Constitution; Jonathan Edwards, the Calvinist theologian (about whom Lowell wrote the poems "Mr. Edwards and the Spider", "Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts", "After the Surprising Conversions", and "The Worst Sinner"); Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan preacher and healer; Robert Livingston (who was also an ancestor on Lowell's paternal side); Thomas Dudley, the second governor of Massachusetts; and Mayflower passengers James Chilton and his daughter Mary Chilton.

Lowell's parents share a common descent from Philip Livingston, the son of Robert Livingston, and were sixth cousins.

As well as a family history steeped in Protestantism, Lowell had notable Jewish ancestors on both sides of his family, which he discusses in Part II ("91 Revere Street") of Life Studies.

Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) was an American poet.

He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the Mayflower.

His family, past and present, were important subjects in his poetry.

Growing up in Boston also informed his poems, which were frequently set in Boston and the New England region.

The literary scholar Paula Hayes believes that Lowell mythologized New England, particularly in his early work.

Lowell stated, "The poets who most directly influenced me ... were Allen Tate, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams. An unlikely combination! ... but you can see that Bishop is a sort of bridge between Tate's formalism and Williams's informal art."

Lowell wrote in both formal, metered verse as well as free verse; his verse in some poems from Life Studies and Notebook fell somewhere in between metered and free verse.

After Lowell graduated from Kenyon in 1940 with a degree in Classics, he worked on a master's degree in English literature at Louisiana State University and taught introductory courses in English for one year before the U.S. entered World War II.

He was appointed the sixth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, where he served from 1947 until 1948.

In addition to winning the National Book Award, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947 and 1974, the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1947.

He is "widely considered one of the most important American poets of the postwar era."

His biographer Paul Mariani called him "the poet-historian of our time" and "the last of [America's] influential public poets."

Lowell was born to United States Navy Cmdr. Robert Traill Spence Lowell III and Charlotte Winslow in Boston, Massachusetts.

After the publication of his 1959 book Life Studies, which won the 1960 National Book Award and "featured a new emphasis on intense, uninhibited discussion of personal, family, and psychological struggles", he was considered an important part of the confessional poetry movement.

However, much of Lowell's work, which often combined the public with the personal, did not conform to a typical "confessional poetry" model.

Instead, Lowell worked in a number of distinctive stylistic modes and forms over the course of his career.

Lowell later referenced the nickname in his poem "Caligula", first published in his book For the Union Dead and later republished in a revised sonnet version for his book, Notebook 1967–1968.

Lowell received his high school education at St. Mark's School, a prominent prep school in Southborough, Massachusetts.

There he met and was influenced by the poet Richard Eberhart, who taught at the school, and as a high school student, Lowell decided that he wanted to become a poet.

At St. Mark's, he became lifelong friends with Frank Parker, an artist who later created the prints that Lowell used on the covers of most of his books.

Lowell attended Harvard College for two years.

While he was a freshman at Harvard, he visited Robert Frost in Cambridge and asked for feedback on a long poem he had written on the Crusades; Frost suggested that Lowell needed to work on his compression.

In an interview, Lowell recalled, "I had a huge blank verse epic on the First Crusade and took it to him all in my undecipherable pencil-writing, and he read a little of it, and said, 'It goes on rather a bit, doesn't it?' And then he read me the opening of Keats's 'Hyperion', the first version, and I thought all of that was sublime."

After two years at Harvard, Lowell was unhappy, and his psychiatrist, Merrill Moore, who was also a poet, suggested that Lowell take a leave of absence from Harvard to get away from his parents and study with Moore's friend, the poet-professor Allen Tate who was then living in Nashville and teaching at Vanderbilt University.

Lowell traveled to Nashville with Moore, who took Lowell to Tate's house.

Lowell asked Tate if he could live with him and his wife, and Tate joked that if Lowell wanted to, Lowell could pitch a tent on Tate's lawn; Lowell then went to Sears to purchase a tent that he set up on Tate's lawn and lived in for two months.

Lowell called the act "a terrible piece of youthful callousness".

After spending time with the Tates in Nashville (and attending some classes taught by John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt), Lowell decided to leave Harvard.

When Tate and John Crowe Ransom left Vanderbilt for Kenyon College in Ohio, Lowell followed them and resumed his studies there, majoring in Classics, in which he earned an A.B., summa cum laude.

He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa his junior year and was valedictorian of his class.

He settled into the so-called "writer's house" (a dorm that received its nickname after it had accrued several ambitious young writers) with fellow students Peter Taylor, Robie Macauley and Randall Jarrell.

Partly in rebellion against his parents, Lowell converted from Episcopalianism to Catholicism.