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;[9][10] 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.

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?'

[20] 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.

[21] Partly in rebellion against his parents, Lowell converted from Episcopalianism to Catholicism, and was for a time an editor at the Catholic publishing house Sheed & Ward.

"[28][29] He explained that after the bombing at Pearl Harbor, he was prepared to fight in the war until he read about the American terms of unconditional surrender that he feared would lead to the "permanent destruction of Germany and Japan.

If Ames were not fired immediately, Lowell vowed to "blacken the name of Yaddo as widely as possible" using his connections in the literary sphere and Washington.

[12] In response to American air raids in Vietnam in 1965, Lowell rejected an invitation to the White House Festival of the Arts from President Lyndon Johnson in a letter that he subsequently published in The New York Times, stating, "We are in danger of imperceptibly becoming an explosive and suddenly chauvinistic nation, and may even be drifting on our way to the last nuclear ruin.

[33] In 1968, Lowell publicly supported the Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president in a three-way primary against Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.

[6][35] Later, Donald James Winslow hired Lowell to teach at Boston University, where his students included the poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

[6] Numerous poets, critics and scholars, including Kathleen Spivack, James Atlas, Helen Vendler, and Dudley Young, have written essays about Lowell's teaching style and/or about his influence over their lives.

[39][40] The editors of Contemporary Literary Criticism wrote that the book "exerted a profound influence on subsequent American poets, including other first generation confessionalists such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

"[41] In a 1962 interview, Sylvia Plath stated that Life Studies had influenced the poetry she was writing at that time (and which her husband, Ted Hughes, would publish posthumously as Ariel a few years later): "I've been very excited by what I feel is the new breakthrough that came with, say, Robert Lowell's Life Studies, this intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience which I feel has been partly taboo.

"[42][43] In an essay published in 1985, the poet Stanley Kunitz wrote that Life Studies was "perhaps the most influential book of modern verse since T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

[59] On multiple occasions, Lowell was admitted to the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and one of his poems, "Waking in the Blue", references his stay in this large psychiatric facility.

[60] While bipolar disorder was often a great burden to the writer and his family, it also provided the subject for some of Lowell's most influential poetry, as in his book Life Studies.

Saskia Hamilton, the editor of Lowell's Letters, notes, "Lithium treatment relieved him from suffering the idea that he was morally and emotionally responsible for the fact that he relapsed.

[44][74][75] In his acceptance speech for the National Book Award, Lowell famously divided American poetry into two camps: the "cooked" and the "raw.

Broadway director and theater critic Harold Clurman wrote that Lowell's Phaedra was "a close paraphrase of Racine with a slightly Elizabethan tinge; it nevertheless renders a great deal of the excitement--if not the beauty--which exists in the original."

"[84][85] Helen Vendler states that the title poem in the collection "honors not only the person of [the Civil War hero] Robert Gould Shaw, but also the stern and beautiful memorial bronze bas-relief [depicting Shaw and the all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment] ... which stands opposite the Boston State House.

The second half of the book also shows Lowell returning once again to writing loose translations (including verse approximations of Dante, Juvenal, and Horace).

In his "Afterthought" at the end of Notebook 1967-1968, Lowell explained the premise and timeline of the book: This is not my diary, my confession, not a puritan's too literal pornographic honesty, glad to share private embarrassment, and triumph.

[91] In this same "Afterthought" section, Lowell acknowledges some of his source materials for the poems, writing, "I have taken from many books, used the throwaway conversational inspirations of my friends, and much more that I idly spoke to myself."

Some of the sources and authors he cites include Jesse Glenn Gray's The Warriors, Simone Weil's Half a Century Gone, Herbert Marcuse, Aijaz Ahmad, R. P. Blackmur, Plutarch, Stonewall Jackson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In 1969, Lowell made his last foray into dramatic work with the publication of his prose translation of the ancient Greek play Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus.

A minor controversy erupted when Lowell admitted to having incorporated (and altered) private letters from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick into poems for The Dolphin.

In a letter to Lowell regarding The Dolphin, dated March 21, 1972, before he'd published the book, Bishop praised the writing, saying, "Please believe that I think it is wonderful poetry."

[8] Since the release of Lowell's Collected Poems in 2003, a number of critics and poets have praised the sonnets, including Michael Hofmann, William Logan, and Richard Tillinghast (though Logan and Hofmann note that they both strongly preferred the original Notebook versions of the sonnets over the revised versions that Lowell published in History and To Lizzie and Harriet).

The best-known poem from this collection is the last one, titled "Epilogue," in which Lowell reflects upon the "confessional" school of poetry with which his work was associated.

In this poem he wrote, But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, heightened from life, yet paralyzed by fact.