James Russell Lowell

Biography

James Russell Lowell was born on February 22, 1819, into the eighth generation of the Lowell family, descendants of Percival Lowle who settled in Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1639. His father, the Reverend Charles Lowell, was a Unitarian minister in Boston who had studied theology at Edinburgh; his mother was Harriett Brackett Spence Lowell. The family owned a large Cambridge estate called Elmwood, where James was the youngest of six children. His mother fostered his early love of literature, especially poetry, ballads, and tales from her native Orkney. He attended school under Sophia Dana and later under a harsh disciplinarian, counting Richard Henry Dana Jr. among his classmates.

Lowell entered Harvard College at age 15 in 1834 but was a poor student, frequently absent from chapel and classes. In his senior year he edited the literary magazine Harvardiana, contributing prose and poetry he later deemed low quality. He was a member of Hasty Pudding and befriended fellow troublemaker George W. Minns. Though elected class poet, he was suspended before Class Day in 1838 and could not recite his poem; it was printed thanks to classmates' subscriptions. During his exile in Concord under the Rev. Barzallai Frost, he befriended Ralph Waldo Emerson and met other Transcendentalists. His Class Day poem satirized abolitionists, Thomas Carlyle, Emerson, and the Transcendentalists.

Writing style and literary theory

Early in his career, Lowell's writing was influenced by Swedenborgianism, a Spiritualism-infused form of Christianity, leading Frances Longfellow to remark that he had long been in the habit of seeing spirits. He composed poetry rapidly when inspired by an 'inner light' but could not write to order. He subscribed to the nineteenth-century belief that the poet was a prophet, linking religion, nature, poetry, and social reform. Though not officially part of the Young America movement, he shared some of its ideals, including the view that writers have inherent insight into humanity's moral nature and an obligation for literary action. Unlike many contemporaries, Lowell did not advocate for a new national literature; he called for a natural literature regardless of country, caste, or race, warning against provincialism. He agreed with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that 'whoever is most universal, is also most national.' A linguistics scholar, Lowell helped found the American Dialect Society. In The Biglow Papers, he used eye dialect to represent a rural Yankee vernacular, rebelling against formal literary representations of Americans. This precise depiction of early New England dialect was pioneering in American literature.

Beliefs

Lowell was an abolitionist, but his opinions on African-Americans wavered. He advocated suffrage for blacks yet noted potential troubles, writing that the white race's intellectual and traditional superiority would prevent serious mischief. He described freed slaves as 'dirty, lazy & lying.' Before his marriage to abolitionist Maria White, he sympathized with abolitionists as the only party of the extant ones. After marriage, he was gradually pulled into the cause, and the couple often gave money to fugitive slaves, even when financially strained. However, he did not always agree with movement followers, saying they treated ideas like cherries, swallowing them stones and all. He depicted Southerners unfavorably in his second collection of The Biglow Papers but by 1865 considered them 'guilty only of weakness,' and by 1868 sympathized with their viewpoint on slavery. Abolitionist Samuel Joseph May accused Lowell of trying to quit the movement due to his association with Harvard and Boston Brahmin culture.

Criticism and legacy

In 1849, Lowell predicted he would be popular as the first poet to express the American Idea. Walt Whitman described him as a builder who measured poems within formula rather than a grower. John Greenleaf Whittier praised Lowell as 'our new Theocritus' and a strong, manly republican poet. British author Thomas Hughes called him one of America's most important writers, comparing him to Aristophanes, Juvenal, Cervantes, and others. His satires and dialect inspired Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, H. L. Mencken, and Ring Lardner. Margaret Fuller criticized his verse as stereotyped and thought posterity would not remember him. Evert Augustus Duyckinck found Lowell too similar to Shakespeare and Milton. Ralph Waldo Emerson noted his technical skill but felt his poetry expressed wish rather than uncontrollable impulse. Richard Henry Dana Jr. called him clever and good-humored but a trifler. In the twentieth century, Richard Armour dismissed Lowell's attempt to write like an illiterate oaf. Amy Lowell's poem A Critical Fable mocked her relative, with a fictional Lowell doubting women's equality in the arts. Van Wyck Brooks wrote that Lowell's poetry was forgettable, like writing in water.