Poets: The Second Chance

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and modern languages, an abolitionist, Ambassador to Spain and the Court of St. James's, author of The Bigelow Papers, and of course poet and perfervid hymn writer ("By the light of burning martyrs, Jesus' bleeding feet I track"). From yet another family branch came Amy Lowell (1874-1925), who wrote passable "imagist" verse, smoked cigars, and drove a claret-colored limousine. "To my family," says Robert Lowell, "James was the Ambassador to England, not a writer. Amy seemed a bit peculiar to them. She was never a welcome subject in our household."

Badgered. Robert comes from the Russell-Spence branch of the family, whose most notable member, Great-Great-Grandmother Harriet Traill Spence, seems to have had her kinky side—although no one is quite certain what it was. Family Chronicler Ferris Greenslet writes that the Spences possessed "a certain mystical dreaminess that sometimes obscured the need for immediate action in the small, imperative affairs of daily living." In family privacy, this trait was dignified with a genteel euphemism: it was called "the Spence negligence."

In a melancholy memoir, 91 Revere Street, Lowell tells of life with Father and Mother in Boston. Father was Commander Lowell (Annapolis 1906), a dim, mumbling man who left the Navy for a series of sad civilian jobs, ending as a brokerage customers' man "with himself the only customer." The real commander was Mother, a Winslow, who nagged her husband into resigning from the Navy and badgered him out of the deeds to his own house. In Life Studies, Lowell recalls contemptuously:

"Anchors aweigh," Daddy

in his bathtub, "Anchors aweigh," when Lever Brothers offered to pay him double what the Navy paid, I nagged for his dress sword with gold braid, and cringed because Mother, new caps on all her teeth, was born anew at forty. With seamanlike celerity, Father left the Navy, and deeded Mother his property.

Celestial Robes. Lowell came early to his vocation. He was a fifth-form schoolboy at St. Marks, the prestigious Episcopal prep school in Southborough, Mass., when he received his calling. Awkward, myopic, shy, dull in class except in history, he shambled about the sham Tudor buildings. His friends called him "Cal," after Caligula, because he was so uncouth; he liked that, and today is still known as Cal. His nature became clear to classmates after he started reading commentaries on the Iliad and Dante's Inferno. As his roommate, Artist Frank Parker, recalls: "The point was that you could put yourself into heaven or hell by your own choice.

You could make your own destiny. That became Cal's text."

To test this theory, Lowell threw his powerful but ill-coordinated body into football. The theory was sound: he won his letter as tackle. "It was more will power than love of the game," says Parker. "It was his way of exercising the moral imperative." But would the theory be valid for poetry?

Lowell plodded doggedly into an epic on the Crusades. His first published poem, Madonna, was pretty bad, even for a school magazine: Celestial were her robes; Her hands were made divine; But the Virgin's face was silvery bright Like the holy light! Which from God's throne Is said to shine.

But