Robert Lowell

1917-1977

Robert Lowell is buried in the private Stark Cemetery, Dunbarton, Merrimack County, New Hampshire, USA. (See map...ref no. 9)

Lowell spent many of his final years in England following his marriage to the novelist Caroline Blackwood in 1973. (This was his 3rd marriage.)

He died suddenly of a heart attack on 12 September 1977 whilst on his way to New York.

Lowell's collection Life Studies - published in 1959 - changed the face of modern American poetry with its confessional style and its departure from formal verse and metre forms.

Stark Cemetery

During World War II Lowell was jailed for six months for being a conscientious objector - experiences which he later recorded in his poem Memories of West Street and Lepke.

The Lowell family - one of the oldest and most prominent of Boston families - had already produced two previous poets: James Russell Lowell (1819-91) and the experimental poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925).

Lowell's final collection of verse Day by Day was published in the year of his death.

One night you dreamed

you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,

and trying to pull

off the barnacles with your hands.

We wished our two souls

might return like gulls

to the rock. In the end,

the water was too cold for us.

From Water

Links:

Modern American Poetry

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