Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Can you eat skunk Lowell grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied at Harvard University and Kenyon College. American poet lies in the astonishing variety of his work.
Selected Poems, about thirty years of writing, my impression is that the thread that strings it together is my autobiography. Life Studies, give glimpse after glimpse into the world of his childhood. Mark’s in Southborough, Massachusetts, and then, briefly, Harvard University. But while he was a student at Harvard in 1937, he had a fight with his father and left home, a rebellion that had serious consequences for his life and his poetry. Lowell crammed much activity into the next few years. The title of Land of Unlikeness, as Jerome Mazzaro points out in The Poetic Themes of Robert Lowell, is taken from a quotation of Saint Bernard and refers to the human soul’s unlikeness to God and unlikeness to its own past self.
In this volume, according to Hugh B. Many of the poems in Land of Unlikeness appear as well in Lowell’s second volume, Lord Weary’s Castle, and the two books address the same concerns. Lord Weary’s Castle, with its blending of oppositions to war, to the Puritan ethic, and to materialism and greed, is Lowell’s finest early volume, one that earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. It was after its publication that Lowell met Elizabeth Bishop, one of the most important poetic friendships of his life. Lord Weary’s Castle, was less successful. By the time of its publication, Lowell had been divorced from Stafford, had left the Roman Catholic church, had suffered the first serious attack of the manic-depressive illness that was to plague him throughout his life, and had married the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. Between the publication of The Mills of the Kavanaughs and the publication in 1959 of Life Studies, Lowell taught at several universities and made a speaking tour of the West Coast, where he encountered the thematically and stylistically revolutionary poetry of Allen Ginsberg and the other Beat writers.