Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville, Tennessee on May 6, 1914. He earned a bachelor's and master's degrees from Vanderbilt University. His first book of poetry, Blood from a Stranger, was published in 1942. During World War II, he served with the Army Air Force as a control tower operator. His other books of poetry include Little Friend, Little Friend; Losses; and The Lost World. He won the National Book Award in 1961 for The Woman at the Washington Zoo. In addition to writing poetry, he reviewed it during a brief period spent as poetry editor for The Nation. Poetry and the Age and A Sad Heart at the Supermarket are collections of his essays as a poetry critic. His teaching career… included stints at Kenyon College, the University of Texas, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Illinois, and the University of North Carolina/Greensboro. He also was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate. He was hit by a car in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and died in October 14, 1965 at the age of 51.
Born in Boston, Robert Lowell, great-grandnephew of James Russell Lowell and distant cousin of Amy Lowell, was a brilliant and rebellious member of that distinguished family. He received his B.A. in 1940 from Kenyon College, where he had studied underJohn Crowe Ransom and came to know Allen Tate. In 1940, he also converted to Catholicism. During World War II, he tried twice to enlist, but by the time he was called, his strong feelings against the bombing of civilians had made him a conscientious objector. He was married for a time to Elizabeth Hardwick, editor of the N.Y. Review of Books. His subject matter includes New England and its traditions, colored in the early poems by an… intellectualized religious symbolism and a savage satire against the materialism of modern American life. Lowell won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for "Lord Weary's Castle" (1946), in which religion was beginning to fade as a source of his symbolism. In "Life Studies," which won the National Book Award for poetry in 1960, he offers portraits of his New England relatives through whom he studies himself and his origins. It was with this volume that critics began to speak of Lowell as a confessional poet. For the "Union Dead" (1964), another collection, continued the exploration of his own and the United States' past and present. Among Lowell's other prizes were the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize (1961) and the 1962 Bollingen Prize of $2,500, which he shared with Richmond Lattimore, for "Imitations." Lowell was also well known for his active political concerns. Bitterly opposed to the Vietnam War, he caused a sensation in 1965 when he rejected a White House invitation to appear at a festival of the arts. In his letter to President Johnson, he wrote: "Every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making subtle public commitments." He demonstrated against the war (notably with Norman Mailer at a vast gathering at the Pentagon in 1967), spoke repeatedly in favor of peace, and accompanied Senator Eugene McCarthy during his antiwar campaign for the 1968 presidential nomination. Lowell's thoughtful and visionary genius was clearly a response and a challenge to his times, as well as a reflection of deep-seated historical anxieties. The poetry of Lowell's late period, especially the "Notebook" (1969) volumes, portrays the agonies of failed heroic values and the debilitating effects of historical irony. This late poetry shows how all of Lowell's idealism was an inescapable struggle, with only tenuous victories. The self-consciousness and autobiographical shorthand of his final volume, "Day by Day" (1977), give off an uncanny glow of sadness and weary acceptance fitting for a person who was the leading poet of his generation.