Michael Hofmann

Robert Lowell struggled all his life to elude his rarefied Boston heritage

He abandoned Harvard, converted to Catholicism, married twice, became a conscientious objector and – not least – devoted himself to poetry

The infant Robert Lowell with his father, the put- upon naval commander who struggled to ‘teach himself manhood’. Credit Alamy 
issue 17 December 2022
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  • Memoirs

    Robert Lowell, edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc

    Faber, pp. 387, £40

The American poet Robert Lowell (1917-77) was a so-called ‘Boston Brahmin’, a Lowell of Boston, where, in the widely known distich, ‘the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God’. (In 1923, when one Harry H. Kabotchnik, against furious protests from the Cabots, succeeded in getting his name changed, this briefly became ‘and the Cabots speak Yiddish, by God’.

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