On the interconnections and variations within one family, and the
compelling poems that depict them.
Across multiple generations, in multiple arenas, the Lowell family fought
to end the system of slavery. James Russell
Lowell and his wife Maria White worked closely with abolitionists
throughout the 1840s, with James editing the Pennsylvania Freeman (an
abolitionist newspaper in Philadelphia) and publishing The
Biglow Papers (1848), a collection of the most overtly anti-slavery poems
published before the Civil War. When that war began, Lowell’s nephew Charles
Russell Lowell left his successful job as the head of Maryland ironworks to
serve as a captain in the Union Army; before his tragic death at the Battle of Cedar Creek he
managed both to distinguish himself on numerous occasions and to marry
the sister of fellow officer and ardent abolitionist
Robert Gould Shaw.
Half a century later, as American society and literature shifted into new
20th century forms, the Lowell family would produce two unique and
talented poets. Amy
Lowell, whose impressive generation included brothers Percival (a noteworthy
astronomer) and Abbott
(a Harvard president), published collections of
imagist poems throughout the
1910s and 20s that rival those of contemporary proto-modernists Gertrude
Stein, Ezra Pound, and H.D. In the next generation, Amy’s
distant cousin Robert
Lowell would befriend Ford Madox Ford, Randall Jarrell, John Crowe Ransom, and
many other young writers, serve prison time as a
World War II conscientious objector, teach at a half dozen significant
writing programs, and publish many volumes of
postwar poetry, including the classics Life
Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead (1964).
As both of those books’ titles suggest, Robert Lowell’s poems were
intensely biographical and historical, and so offer compelling depictions of
precisely these family histories. In the sonnet “Charles Russell Lowell:
1835-1864” (included in the collection Notebook
1967-1968 [1969]), for example, Lowell examines both that impressive
ancestor and (as he does throughout Union
Dead) the meaning of such histories for present-day Massachusetts and
America (an America involved in a far more controversial war, one that Lowell
would actively and famously protest). In that poem, as in most of his
works, Lowell reminds us that being part of an American family is about more
than genetics or bloodlines—it’s a set of histories and stories that become
part of our own evolving identity and perspective, and of what we pass on, in
our writing and lives, to those who follow us.
Special family post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Family histories or stories
you’d highlight, American or yours?
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