Robert Lowell's 91 Revere Street

Robert Lowell is commonly regarded as a highly influential American writer during the 20th century. From our discussions in class, we know that Robert Lowell was born into a wealthy Massachusetts family that could trace its roots back to the original settlers from the Mayflower, and included many famous and influential historical figures. Because of his family’s wealth, it may have seemed on the surface that Robert Lowell had a perfect life, and was free to pursue all his options. However, his poetry gives us an insight into his life as a child and the wrecked relationship between himself and his parents. As we have discussed several times in class, Lowell’s parents were largely absent both physically and emotionally and did not give him the
New England is a haven for Lowell and the source of his inspiration for most of his poetry because of the vast experiences he had while living in New England. Lowell conveys his life at home and the relationship between himself and his parents on Boston’s Beacon Hill in the poem, “91 Revere Street”. This poem is one of Lowell’s most famous and well known poems within his “Life Studies” collection of poetry. In it, he goes into great detail about the unhappy marriage between his parents, which was most likely responsible for their inability to show Robert Lowell the attention he needed as a child. He states, “I writhed with disappointment on the nights when Mother and Father only lowed harmoniously together like cows” (24). This reinforces the idea that his parents were in an unhappy marriage and Lowell had to watch his parents attempt to force their marriage into working. It is clear from this quote that the rocky foundation of his parents marriage created an unstable living situation for Robert Lowell and negatively affected the way he viewed his parents. The reason for his parents indifference towards each other was mostly because of the post traumatic stress Lowell’s father was facing after returning home from so many years as a member of the U.S. Navy during WWII. There are several instances throughout “91 Revere Street” when Lowell
Lowell discusses his time in prison and the fractured prison system during the 1960s in his poem, “Memories of West Street and Lepke”. In this poem, Lowell starts by discussing his comfortable life as a parent in the very affluent section of Boston that he calls the, “...hardly passionate Marlborough Street” (4). The poem then takes a radical shift to Lowell being imprisoned during the 1950s because of his nature as a conscientious objector to World War II (class discussion). Lowell then goes on to describe his disgust for the terms of imprisonment and the criteria one needs to be placed in prison. Lowell is placed in prison and encounters another conscientious objector, a man who was imprisoned for being a Jehovah’s Witness, and a young black man who was arrested for marijuana possession. He describes the three as, “a jaundice yellow/ and fly-weight pacifist/… a J.W./… a negro boy with curlicues/ of marijuana in his hair” (27-28, 39, 18-19). As we have discussed in class, we know that this is a commentary on the fractured institution of prison during the 1950s and the unfair and heavy punishments innocent people receive for minor crimes against the state. Lowell then goes on to talk about another inmate, Czar Lepke. From our class discussions and Wikipedia, we know that Czar Lepke was a notorious