美国文学课件 3.pptVIP

Robert Traill Spence Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 1 March 1917. His father, also Robert Traill Spence Lowell, was an officer in the United States Navy. Lowells mother, Charlotte Winslow Lowell, descended from an old New England family. The Robert’s study career Lowell was educated at private schools in Boston and, for two years, at St. Marks preparatory school. Even during his youth, and certainly by the time he studied at St. Marks, Lowell had decided upon a career as a poet. He spent summers reading and studying the English literary tradition, imposing his reading lists on friends from school. Upon graduation from St. Marks, he attended Harvard (as men in his family had done for generations). After two years at Harvard, however, Lowell left. His departure was precipitated by his meeting, in 1937, with Allen Tate, a poet of the Fugitive group and a practitioner of the not-yet-institutionalized New Criticism. Lowell and Tate immediately took to one another and Lowell traveled to Tates Tennessee home during the summer of 1937; he camped out in Tates yard, writing poetry and studying at the feet of the older poet. Instead of returning to Harvard that fall, Lowell transferred to Kenyon College, in Ohio, to study with John Crowe Ransom, Tates mentor. At Kenyon, Lowell befriended Randall Jarrell and Peter Taylor, both of whom went on to their own successful careers as writers. Lowell graduated summa cum laude in Classics from Kenyon in 1940. He spent the next year studying with Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren at Louisiana State University. Before departing for Louisiana, Lowell married Jean Stafford, a writer of short stories and novels. 1940 also saw Lowells conversion to Roman Catholicism, a repudiation of his ancestors New England Protestantism as well as a dedication to what seemed to him the more authentic faith of the Roman Church. After a year at Louisiana State, Lowell and Stafford moved to Monteagle, Tennessee, where they shared a hous