Background

James Russell Lowell was born on February 22, 1819 in "Elmwood, " in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. His father, the Reverend Charles Lowell, for more than forty years minister of the West Church (Unitarian), Boston, was descended from Perceval Lowell (or Lowle) who emigrated in 1639 from England to settle at Newbury in the Massachusetts colony. Immediately back of Charles Lowell in descent were two John Lowells, graduates, like himself, of Harvard College, of which his father, Judge John Lowell, 1743-1802, was a fellow.

From Harriet Brackett Spence, daughter of Keith and Mary (Traill) Spence of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the wife of the Reverend Charles Lowell, their poetic son received a sharply different strain of inheritance. Her forebears on both sides had come from the Orkney Islands; she herself, brought up in the Episcopal Church, in which one of her sons, Robert Traill Spence Lowell, became a clergyman, was of a mystical strain, with a reputed gift of second sight and a contagious love of old ballads, proper to one not impossibly related to the hero of the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. The spirit of this mother was, indeed, so sensitive that in her final years it fell into a disorder that called forth her son's poem, "The Darkened Mind, " ending with the sorrowful lines: "Not so much of thee is left among us As the hum outliving the hushed bell. " Through Lowell's boyhood and younger manhood, however, her influence played a vital part in the forming of the poet, even as the paternal strain fortified the future publicist.

Education

Lowell attended the classical school of Mr. William Wells in Cambridge. Thereafter he entered Harvard College. As an undergraduate he took his prescribed duties with a lightness that could meet only with disapproval from academic authorities. Promiscuous reading in the college library was not then encouraged, but without it he could hardly have formed those lasting friendships with books described in his paper on Landor. "It was, " he wrote, "the merest browsing, no doubt, as Johnson called it, but how delightful it was! All the more, I fear, because it added the stolen sweetness of truancy to that of study, for I should have been buckling to my allotted task of the day. I do not regret that diversion of time to other than legitimate expenses, yet shall I not gravely warn my grandsons to beware of doing the like?". This tendency might have been overlooked, but at the end of his senior year came a concrete offense which could not escape punishment. In T. W. Higginson's Old Cambridge and Ferris Greenslet's James Russell Lowell may be found good evidence for believing that Lowell's personal celebration of his election as class poet sent him to chapel one afternoon when he might better have gone to his room, for at the beginning of the service he rose in his place and bowed, with smiles, to left and right, as if in acknowledgment of the honor his classmates had paid him.

On the ground of "continued neglect of his college duties" the faculty promptly rusticated him to the care and instruction of the Reverend Barzillai Frost in the neighboring town of Concord until "the Saturday before Commencement. " Thus he was prevented from reading his own class poem, a young conservative's fling, both jaunty and grave, at causes and persons soon to enlist his sympathies. Here he is even found decrying: "those who roar and rave O'er the exaggerated tortures of the slave. " The poem is not included in his published works, but, filling thirty-nine generous pages of what has now become a rare pamphlet, it may be read as a truly promising and prophetic performance for the youth of nineteen who received his bachelor's degree with the Harvard class of 1838. The few years of "finding himself" that followed immediately upon his leaving college were far from placid. He began the study of law, and, in spite of many uncertainties about its continuance, graduated at the Harvard Law School in 1840. Later he went to Europe (June 1855 - August 1856) for studies, especially in Germany and Italy, which should augment his qualifications for the teaching of European letters.

Career

On December 26, 1844 Lowell made his public beginnings as poet, editor, critic, and reformer. In poetry this period marked the appearance of A Year's Life (1841) and Poems (1844). The second volume contained several anti-slavery poems. Thus the young conservative became something of a radical before he was twenty-five. As a critic of literature he printed his first book, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets (1845). Much of this volume had already appeared serially in the Boston Miscellany, edited by Nathan Hale, even as many poems in the two previous volumes had been printed first in periodicals. Though Lowell declared in later life, "I am a book-man", he might have said with equal truth, "I am a magazine man, " for both as editor and as contributor he touched the periodicals of his time at an extraordinary number of points.

His first appearance as an editor was in connection with The Pioneer: A Literary and Critical Magazine, produced in the months of January, February, and March 1843, by Lowell and his friend Robert Carter as editors and proprietors. Whether through lack of support or through a failure of Lowell's eyesight which drove him to New York for treatment by a specialist, the venture was short-lived; but the three issues, containing contributions from Poe, Hawthorne, Whittier, and others whose names have endured, testify to Lowell's instincts and capacities as an editor. In an introduction to the first issue, setting forth the aims of The Pioneer, he wrote in a vein that seems contemporaneous today, even while it was prophetic of what was to befall Lowell himself: "We hear men speak of the restless spirit of the age, as if our day were peculiar in this regard. But it has always been the same . .. still the new spirit yearns and struggles and expects great things; still the Old shakes its head, ominous of universal anarchy; still the world rolls calmly on, and the youth grown old shakes its wise head at the next era. " Before completing this process himself Lowell was to live through some years of relative radicalism.

Brought into the anti-slavery movement by his ardent young Maria White's enthusiasm for the cause and never himself counted one of its more violent advocates, he nevertheless identified himself completely with it by serving in Philadelphia as an editorial writer for the Pennsylvania Freeman, by continuing, on his return to Cambridge early in the summer of 1845, to write, in prose and verse, against slavery, and, within a year, by forming a connection with a New York publication, The National Anti-Slavery Standard, of which, two years later, in 1848, he became "corresponding editor. "

The year 1848, called by one of Lowell's biographers (Ferris Greenslet) his annus mirabilis, certainly justified that name, for during its course, besides a volume of Poems by James Russell Lowell, Second Series, he published A Fable for Critics, the first volume of The Biglow Papers, and The Vision of Sir Launfal. To his claims for consideration as a poet and critic, this output added the claims of a humorist and political satirist. Thus at twenty-nine he had made his challenge in all the fields of production in which his ultimate place among American writers must be determined. In the Fable for Critics humor and criticism are more frankly and plentifully blended than anywhere else in his writings. The critical estimates of his contemporaries among American writers have in general proved surprisingly near to the verdicts of posterity.

Nowhere more clearly than in the Fable for Critics, from its ingeniously rhymed title-page through its seventy-four pages of text in the first edition, does Lowell exhibit his facility in the twisting of words into all the shapes demanded by punning and verse-making. He was indeed an incorrigible punster in prose as well as verse. Even in a serious book review he was capable of applying to certain Shakespearian commentators "the quadrisyllabic name of the brother of Agis, King of Sparta"--in which it took a Felton to recognize Eudamidas. This, for all its elaboration, has a neatness that justifies it--which cannot be said for all of Lowell's verbal pranks. Some of his ineptitudes became apparent even to Lowell after their first commission and were removed from later printings. Witness, for example, in the course of so serious and admirable a poem as "The Cathedral", the miserable interchange with an Englishman at Chartres: " 'Esker vous ate a nabitang?' he asked; 'I never ate one; are they good?' asked I. " Such things are incredible, but there they are in the spontaneity of Lowell's first printing, subject to all such discount as the spirit of a period of ponderous jocosity will warrant, yet certainly dimming the luster to which he had so many valid claims as a wit and, in the eighteenth-century meaning of the term, a man of taste.

As the Fable for Critics illustrates, from several angles, one aspect of Lowell, so do The Biglow Papers, of which the first series appeared in the same year, 1848. Lowell's preoccupation with words is here displayed through the medium of dialect. Proud of his intimacy with the finer shades of the Yankee vernacular--"I reckon myself a good taster of dialects, " he once wrote--he carried to an extreme of phonetic exactness his reproductions of the peculiarities of New England speech. To this somewhat elaborate vehicle of his humor another was added in the academic utterances of the Reverend Homer Wilbur, whose list of degrees in an imaginary college catalogue is one of Lowell's triumphs of fooling. Through the mingled prose and verse of this clergyman, the rustic Hosea Biglow, and other mouthpieces, Lowell delivered himself, in the first series of Biglow Papers, of trenchantly telling criticism of the national government in the conduct of the Mexican War, especially in relation to the possible extension of slavery. These articles, appearing in the periodical press before their assemblage between covers, produced a palpable effect upon public opinion and first gave to Lowell the place he was henceforth to occupy as a patriotic observer of political affairs whose opinions about them must be reckoned with.

Nearly twenty years later the same medium of Biglow Papers stood ready to convey his sentiments on the Civil War--sentiments in which a distrust and dislike of England held a surprisingly large place for one who was to become one of the most acceptable of American ministers to Great Britain. Out of all the writings of James Russell Lowell, the two series of Biglow Papers, joining wit, highly skilful writing, and a passionate devotion to liberty and country, may be regarded as his most distinctive contribution to the literature of his time.

Between 1848 and 1853 Lowell spent fifteen months in Europe, ripening his powers by observation and study. After his return he busied himself with writing for magazines and with much intercourse with friends. It is significant that between 1849, when he brought out a two-volume edition of his Poems, and 1864, when his Fireside Travels, a volume of essays, appeared, he made no addition to the list of his published books. The decade ending in 1864 was nevertheless of great moment in his career. Early in its course, and immediately after his delivery in January 1855 of a series of Lowell Institute lectures in Boston on the English poets, he was appointed, in succession to Longfellow, Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures, and professor of belles-lettres in Harvard College; and in 1857 he became editor of the Atlantic Monthly, of which the first number was issued in November of that year.

In his teaching position the scholarly interests which he had long pursued as an amateur became professional interests, with the large by-product of critical writing which he was henceforth to produce. Through his editorship--four years with the Atlantic Monthly (1857 - 1861), followed for several years beginning in January 1864 by an association with Charles Eliot Norton in the conduct of the North American Review--he not only found an outlet for his vigorous thinking on political matters and his appreciations of contemporary letters, but exerted a powerful influence in the direction of public thought and taste.

He taught at Harvard college for more than sixteen years. After two years' intermission (August 1872 - July 1874) he took it up for four years more. Nominally he held the Smith Professorship from 1855 to 1886, when he became professor emeritus for the remaining six years of his life. In Barrett Wendell's Stelligeri a sketch of Lowell as a teacher of Dante to a small class in a college lecture-room or, still more personally, in his own study at "Elmwood, " shows forth the informal method of the sympathetic, stimulating instruction which made him one of the most memorable influences with many college generations at Cambridge.

Through his identification with the infant Atlantic Monthly Lowell bore a leading part in a highly significant episode in the history of American letters. The remarkable group of writers in and about Boston at the middle of the nineteenth century--Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, Holmes, Longfellow, and others, who had flowered simultaneously with the Unitarian reaction from the extreme Calvinism of earlier New England--was really the fortuitous springing up of a band of neighbors of diverse gifts yet with much in common. The Atlantic, standing for liberal thought and speech on matters of politics, religion, and letters, provided them with a single mouthpiece and afforded that sense of solidarity which contributes to the formation of a "school. " Lowell proved himself an admirable editor, not merely in such larger matters of Atlantic policy as his insistence upon securing contributions from Holmes as a "condition precedent" to his accepting the editorship, but in the minuti' of editing, even with respect to emendations in poems by Emerson and Whittier. He gave evidence, moreover, by his own striking contributions in prose and verse to the pages of his magazine, that he should be counted also among its best contributors.

Lowell laid down his editorship of the Atlantic just about the time the Civil War was beginning, and began his association with the North American Review when, in January 1864, it was nearing its end. During the war, however, the Atlantic published several political papers from his pen, besides the second series of Biglow Papers. From 1864 till late in 1866 he contributed to the North American Review a series of vigorous prose papers, afterwards assembled with earlier articles, and one later, in his Political Essays (1888). To Lowell's passion for freedom there was allied, in all his feeling about the war and its consequences, the poignancy of the deaths of three beloved nephews at the front. No wonder that his writings about the issues of the times, whether in prose or in verse, glowed with a special fervor. No wonder that when it fell to him to produce the "Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, July 21, 1865, " in honor of the sons of his college who had given their lives in the war, he produced the poem which, by common agreement, represents him at his best.

The occasion itself was memorable. Phillips Brooks, then a young clergyman settled in Philadelphia, made a prayer which seemed to eclipse all other utterances of a day on which scholars and soldiers held the center of the stage. Lowell's Ode, written at white heat on the very eve of the celebration, after many fears that it would not "come, " suffered grave disadvantages: it was delivered under a strain of weariness from presiding at a Phi Beta Kappa meeting on the day before, and from much sacrifice of sleep for a final copying of the lines; and it lacked the noble strophe relating to Lincoln, which was added after the poem was read. Like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, it seems to have fallen far short of recognition as an outstanding event of the day: indeed, in two Boston newspapers of the next morning no mention of it is found in the long accounts of the exercises. New York papers did better. From the time of its reaching the general public with its Lincoln strophe, in the Atlantic Monthly for September 1865, it took the place which it has held ever since, in the front rank of poems proceeding from the war and preeminent in its expression of Lowell's exalted spirit of patriotism.

Closely related to Lowell's work as a teacher in Harvard College stands the changed proportion of critical to creative writing as he grew older. A volume of poems, Under the Willows (1869), and a single poem, The Cathedral (1870), followed, to be sure, upon his Fireside Travels; but in 1870 also appeared another volume of essays, Among My Books; in 1871 still another, My Study Windows; and in 1876, Among My Books, second series. Literary criticism was the substance of all these volumes. The topics, such as Dryden, Dante, Shakespeare, and other poets, English and American, were topics with which he dealt in the classroom. They lent themselves well to treatment also for such periodicals as the Atlantic and the North American Review, and to assemblage in book form when they sufficed for a new volume.

As a critic Lowell was highly rated in his day, but with the passing of the years his stature has diminished. In The Romantic Revolution in America (1927), V. L. Parrington has found him an exemplar of Bostonian Victorianism, of the united dignity and conscience of English liberalism and Cambridge Brahminism, and has defined him as "a bookish amateur in letters, loitering over old volumes for the pleasure of finding apt phrases and verbal curiosities". An English student of his writings, John M. Robertson, calls him "a man primarily endowed with a great gift of copious literary expatiation, highly 'impressionistic, ' and only under pressure of challenge analytic". W. C. Brownell, in his American Prose Masters (1909), alluding to Lowell's cleverness and personal charm, remarks: "Nothing is more envied in the living. Nothing finds prompter interment with their bones"; and says of his critical work in general that it "will excel more in finding new beauties in the actual than in discovering new requirements in the ideal". The upshot of Professor Norman Foerster's penetrating study of Lowell in his American Criticism (1928) is that he fell short of realizing his ambitions, "partly because his native force was inadequate, and partly because he was sucked into the current of his times". Nevertheless, every critic must acknowledge the breadth and alertness of his reading, the gusto and common sense that pervaded his prose writings, the exuberance of fancy and expression, the flow of humorous extravagance which he would have done well at times to check, the ardor, even the passion, of his feeling for his native land and its traditional ideals. To these qualities may be attributed his influence upon his contemporaries and the generation following.

The books that Lowell was still to write did not materially affect his place in American literature. Prose was decidedly to predominate over poetry. After 1876 two volumes of verse were published during his lifetime: Three Memorial Poems (1877), and Heartsease and Rue (1888); after his death appeared Last Poems of James Russell Lowell (1895). Other posthumous publications were reprints or rescues of fugitive writings which had not seemed to him worthy of preservation.

As the literary and political essays included in his earlier volumes had reflected his life as an editor and professor, so the later essays bore a recognizable relation to his later interests as a public servant. These began when, in 1876, he went as a delegate to the Republican National Convention, to bear his part in the defeat of Blaine and the selection of Hayes as a nominee for the presidency. Serving as a member of the Electoral College, after refusing solicitations to run for Congress, he adhered to Hayes, in the election contest with Tilden, on the clear ground that Hayes was the candidate he was chosen to support. For such party service men less qualified than Lowell for a diplomatic post have received their reward. His came in the spring of 1877, in the form of an invitation to assume the post of United States minister to Spain. His saying, "I should like to see a play of Calderon, " accounted in part for the acceptance of this offer, but for nearly three years in Madrid--from the summer of 1877 to the spring of 1880--he enacted the role of minister with much credit to himself and his country, adapting himself well to the formalities of a ceremonious court, appreciating and appreciated by the cultivated society of Madrid, extending his knowledge of the Spanish language and literature, seizing a summer opportunity for visiting Turkey and Greece, yet sorely harassed in the third year of his mission by the serious illness of his wife.

When he received notice in January 1880 that the President had nominated him minister to the Court of St. James's, his equipment for service there had greatly improved since he left home, and his immediate perception that his wife's health would probably be much the better for the change gave added reason for accepting the post. Of Lowell in England, Henry James wrote characteristically that "some of his more fanatical friends are not to be deterred from regarding his career as in the last analysis a tribute to the dominion of style, " and that "the true reward of an English style was to be sent to England". The reward would have seemed more fitting if in earlier years Lowell's antagonism to England and the English had not been so pronounced. During the Civil War, beyond expressing himself frankly as he did in the "Jonathan to John" verses in the Biglow Papers, he found it nearly impossible to write to a single English correspondent. In his essay on "New England Two Centuries Ago", he alluded to our "English cousins (as they are fond of calling themselves when they are afraid we may do them a mischief)"; and "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners" contains the remark, "Not a Bull of them all but is persuaded he bears Europa upon his back. "

When Lowell and the English came to know each other, the war was fifteen years in the past and there was as much inclination to forgive on the one side as to forget on the other. Lowell indeed performed a notable mission of good will, besides conducting to the satisfaction of all but certain Irish-Americans the delicate relations growing out of Fenian disturbances and carrying on the general work of the London legation. At private and public dinner tables, as on ceremonial and other occasions--such as his assuming the presidency of the Birmingham and Midland Institute (October 6, 1884), when he delivered one of the best of his addresses, "Democracy"--his gift of informal and formal speech kept him in constant demand.

In England, as in America, his friendships with the most interesting men and women of his time played a vital part in his life. In 1885 the newly elected President Cleveland appointed Edward J. Phelps to succeed Lowell in London, and in June he returned to private life, mainly in America. In his six remaining summers there were four visits to England, where his many associations caused him to feel greatly at home. It was really at home, however, at "Elmwood, " on August 12, 1891, that he died, in his seventy-third year.

From Lowell's writings in general his personality is clearly to be deduced--ardent, affectionate, whimsical, deeply serious. In the Letters edited by his friend Charles Eliot Norton his characteristics are revealed perhaps most clearly and consistently. If what seems a consciously "literary" quality in the letters causes a suspicion that ultimate publication was not wholly absent from Lowell's mind, such a suspicion may be dismissed. He was himself conscious of a tendency to write as if for more than a single reader. "It is a bad thing for one's correspondents, I find, " he wrote to his daughter in 1869, "that one has been lecturing these dozen years". His letters indeed seem to have been much like his talk, in which he sparkled, perhaps as brightly as his Saturday Club colleague, Dr. Holmes, though with a superiority over that friend in the capacity of listener. One of his pet topics was the detection of a Jewish strain in unexpected quarters, and "to say the truth, " wrote Sir Leslie Stephen, "this was the only subject upon which I could conceive Lowell approaching within measurable distance of boring". His occasional speeches, like his vers d'occasion, abounded in felicities. In more serious speeches, of which his address at the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard University is an admirable example, he gave impressive utterance to his ripened wisdom. Professor Norman Foerster, in an appraisal of Lowell, states that he "stood forth among his contemporaries because of his accomplished versatility rather than because of high attainment. " Lowell himself, in his essay on Carlyle, wrote that "real fame depends rather on the sum of an author's powers than on any brilliancy of special parts". In special parts Lowell was abundantly brilliant, but the parts were so many and diverse--all of his writings being capable of separate or loosely connected magazine publication--that the effect of his work in its totality is inevitably diffused, and suffers in comparison with that of writers, perhaps of more limited abilities, who employed them with greater concentration. His Biglow Papers, a few of his poems, a few of his essays, seem forty years after his death to be compacted of the stuff of permanence. The great body of his work today offers its reward chiefly to the student of Lowell's time and of Lowell as an eminent figure of that period.

Achievements

• James Russell Lowell was foremost American man of letters in his time and made a significant influence on the development of the literature in the United States. Lowell was a frequent contributor of critical reviews, essays, and poetry to periodicals. He wrote about 50 antislavery articles and the most effective in this regard were his Biglow Papers. Among his other, most important pieces of writing were "The Vision of Sir Launfal", an enormously popular long poem extolling the brotherhood of man; and "A Fable for Critics", a witty and rollicking verse evaluation of contemporary American authors.

Works

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• book

  • Heartsease and Rue (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Heartsease and Rue The electric nerve, whos...)

  • The Early Poems of James Russell Lowell: With Biographical Sketch (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Early Poems of James Russell Lowell: Wit...)

  • A Year's Life (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from A Year's Life As many gentle household gra...)

  • Conversations on Some of the Old Poets (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Conversations on Some of the Old Poets Wish...)

  • The Cathedral (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Cathedral They mingle with our life's e...)

  • Fireside Travels. Boston - 1867

    (Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part...)

  • Under the Willows: And Other Poems. London-1869

    ( About the Book Poetry is a literary form that uses aest...)

  • A Fable for Critics: The Original 1848 Satire

    ("A Fable for Critics" remains one of the most famous sati...)

  • The Vision of Sir Launfal : And Other Poems by James Russell Lowell; Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Julian W. Abernethy, Ph.D.

    (James Russell Lowell was an American Romantic poet, criti...)

  • The Biglow Papers

    (The Biglow Papers By James Russell Lowell)

Views

Quotations: "I shall never be a poet till I get out of the pulpit, and New England was all meeting-house when I was growing up. "

"The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions. "

"As life runs on, the road grows strange with faces new - and near the end. The milestones into headstones change, Neath every one a friend. "

"A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions. "

"A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions. "

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "His interest in the moral questions of the day has supplied the want of vitality in himself; his great facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound. But his verse is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth, and posterity will not remember him" - Margaret Fuller

Connections

Lowell married Maria White in 1844. They were both involved in the movement to abolish slavery. Her interest in reform was matched by her devotion to poetry, in which, besides the gift of appreciation, she possessed a graceful lyric faculty of her own. Their idyllic life together seemed fulfilled in the birth of their first child, Blanche, who died in March 1847 when an infant of less than fifteen months, but lived on in lines among the best known of Lowell's shorter poems: "She Came and Went, " "The Changeling, " and "The First Snow-fall. " A second daughter, Mabel, who survived him, was born in September 1847. A daughter, Rose, born in 1849, lived but a few months. A son, Walter, born in December 1850, died in Rome in April 1852. Before the end of the next year on October 27, 1853, Mrs. Lowell, deeply affected by these losses, herself died. In 1855 a slender volume, The Poems of Maria Lowell, "privately printed" in Cambridge and thus offered rather to friends than to the general public, bore witness to Lowell's appreciation of his wife's poetic gift.

When travelling in Europe, James left his only daughter, Mabel, in Cambridge at the home of his brother-in-law, Dr. Estes Howe, in charge of a governess, Frances Dunlap, whose admirable qualities of mind and character led to the fortunate repair of Lowell's shattered domestic structure through his marriage with her in September 1857. Dunlap died on February 19, 1885.

Father:

Charles Russell Lowell Sr.

clergyman

Mother:

Harriett Brackett Spence Lowell

Spouse:

Frances Dunlap

Spouse:

Maria White

Brother:

Robert Traill Spence Lowell

clergyman

Brother-in-law:

Estes Howe

Daughter:

Blanche Lowell

Daughter:

Mabel Lowell

Daughter:

Rose Lowell

Son:

Walter Lowell

Friend:

Robert Carter

References

• James Russell Lowell: An Address (Classic Reprint)
• James Russell Lowell: A Paper Read at the Eighteenth Annual Dinner, of the Harvard Club of San Francisco, October 22, 1891 (Classic Reprint)
• James Russell Lowell: Portrait of a Many-Sided Man
• James Russell Lowell: A Biography
• James Russell Lowell (Classic Reprint)