James Russell Lowell - Early life, Poetic career, Fame as a satirist, The war years, Late life

Poet, essayist, and diplomat, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. He studied at Harvard, then published two volumes of poetry, helped to edit The Pioneer, and in 1846, at the outbreak of the Mexican War, started work on what was to become The Biglow Papers (1848), a poem denouncing the pro-slavery party and the government. In 1855 he was appointed professor of modern languages and literature at Harvard, went to Europe to finish his studies, and edited the Atlantic Monthly from 1857. The second series of Biglow Papers appeared in 1867. He was later appointed US minister to Spain (1877–80) and Britain (1880–5).

James Russell Lowell (b.

Early life

James Russell Lowell was the son of Rev. Charles Russell Lowell, Sr. (1782 – 1861) and brother of Charles Russell Lowell, Jr, a Brigadier General in the American Civil War who fell at the battle of Cedar Creek.

On his mother's side he was descended from the Spences and Trails, who made their home in the Orkney Islands.

He was brought up near open countryside, and always felt close to nature;

He graduated from Harvard University in 1838, after an undistinguished academic career. During his college course he wrote a number of trivial pieces for a college magazine, and shortly after graduating printed for private circulation the poem his class had asked him to write for their graduation festivities.

Not knowing what vocation to choose, he vacillated among business, the ministry, medicine and law. While studying law, however, he contributed poems and prose articles to various magazines and was one of the five members of the group known as the Fireside Poets.

After an unhappy love affair, he became engaged to Maria White in the autumn of 1840, and the next twelve years of his life were deeply affected by her influence. Maria White Lowell was herself a noted poet. Lowell was already regarded as a man of wit and poetic sentiment;

Poetic career

In 1841, Lowell published A Year's Life, which was dedicated to his future wife, and recorded his new emotions with a backward glance at the preceding period of depression and irresolution. Lowell was inspired to new efforts towards self-support, and though nominally maintaining his law office, he joined a friend, Robert Carter, in founding a literary journal, The Pioneer. It opened the way to new ideals in literature and art, and the writers to whom Lowell turned for assistance—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whittier, Edgar Allan Poe, Story and Parsons, none of them yet possessed of a wide reputation—indicate the acumen of the editor. Lowell had already turned his studies in dramatic and early poetic literature to account in another magazine, and continued the series in The Pioneer, besides contributing poems; but after three monthly numbers, beginning in January 1843, the magazine ceased publication, partly because of Lowell's sudden illness, partly through the inexperience and unfortunate business connections of the founders.

In 1843 he published a collection of his poems, and a year later he gathered up certain material which he had printed, edited and added to it, and produced Conversations on Some of the Old Poets. The book reflects Lowell's state of mind at the time, for the conversations relate only partly to the poets and dramatists of the Elizabethan era;

Literature and reform continued to share Lowell's attention for the next decade. Here, besides continuing his literary contributions to magazines, Lowell had a regular engagement as an editorial writer on The Pennsylvania Freeman, a fortnightly journal devoted to the Anti-Slavery cause. In the spring of 1845 the Lowells returned to Cambridge and made their home at Elmwood. Blanche, the first child born to Lowell, was born on the last day of 1845.

Sadly she died fifteen months later.

James Russell Lowell in 1845

Fame as a satirist

Lowell's mother was in poor mental health, and his wife was physically frail. These troubles combined with a lack of money conspired to make Lowell almost a recluse, but he continued to produce writings which show the interest he took in affairs. early in 1846, he was a correspondent of the London Daily News, and in the spring of 1848 he formed a connection with the National Anti-Slavery Standard of New York, agreeing to contribute weekly either a poem or a prose article.

It was a period of great mental activity, and four books which stand as witnesses to the Lowell of 1848, namely, the second series of Poems, containing among others Columbus, An Indian Summer Reverie, To the Dandelion, The Changeling, A Fable for Critics, in which, after the manner of Leigh Hunt's The Feast of the Poets, he characterizes in witty verse and with good-natured satire American contemporary writers, and in which, the publication being anonymous, he included himself;

Lowell had already acquired a reputation, but this satire brought him wider fame. Lowell discovered what he had done at the same time that the public did, and he followed the poem with eight others, either in the Courier or the Anti-Slavery Standard.

He developed four well-defined characters in the process: a country farmer, Ezekiel Biglow, and his son Hosea;

The death of Lowell's mother, and the fragility of his wife's health, led Lowell, his wife, their daughter Mabel and their infant son Walter, to go to Europe in 1851, and they went direct to Italy. Walter died suddenly in Rome, and they received news of the illness of Lowell's father. They returned in November 1852, and Lowell published some recollections of his journey in the magazines, collecting the sketches later in a prose volume, Fireside Travels. He took part in the editing of an American edition of the British Poets, but the state of his wife's health preoccupied him, and only her death (27 October 1853) released him from the strain of anxiety, the grief accompanied by a readjustment of his nature and a new intellectual activity.

At the invitation of his cousin, he delivered a course of lectures on English poets at the Lowell Institute in Boston in the winter of 1855. Lowell accepted the appointment, with the proviso that he should have a year of study abroad.

He returned to America in the summer of 1856, and began his college duties, retaining his position for twenty years.

The war years

In the autumn of 1857 The Atlantic Monthly was established, and Lowell was its first editor. Both his collegiate and editorial duties stimulated his critical powers, and the publication in the two magazines, followed by republication in book form of a series of studies of great authors, gave him an important place as a critic.

He wrote on a remarkably broad array of writers, including Shakespeare, Dryden, Lessing, Rousseau, Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Milton, Keats, Carlyle, Thoreau, Swinburne, Chaucer, Emerson, Pope, and Gray.

In 1868 he issued the next collection in Under the Willows and Other Poems, but in 1865 he had delivered his Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, and the successive centennial historical anniversaries drew from him a series of stately odes.

Late life

In 1877 Lowell, who had mingled so little in party politics that the sole public office he had held was the nominal one of elector in the Presidential election of 1876, was appointed by President Hayes minister resident at the court of Spain.

In 1880 he was transferred to London as American minister, and remained there until the close of President Arthur's administration in the spring of 1885.

Shortly after his retirement from public life he published Democracy and Other Addresses, all of which had been delivered in England.

His public life had made him more of a figure in the world;

The last months of his life were attended by illness, and he died at Elmwood on the 12 August 1891. After his death his literary executor, Norton, published a brief collection of his poems, and two volumes of added prose, besides editing his letters.

Lowell High School in San Francisco is named in his honor.