Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) was an American poet.
Lowell was born in 1917 into one of Boston’s oldest families. He went to Harvard College for two years and then to Kenyon College. There he studied poetry with poet John Crowe Ransom and graduated in 1940. Then he studied at Louisiana State University. His teachers there were poet Robert Penn Warren and critic Cleanth Brooks.
Many readers and critics thought Lowell was "the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century." In 1947 and 1948, he was the sixth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He won the National Book Award in 1960 (''Life Studies''), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947 (''Lord Weary's Castle'') and 1974 (''The Dolphin''), the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977 (''Day by Day''), and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1947.
Lowell lived with bipolar disorder all of his life. He died suddenly in 1977.
Books
Land of Unlikeness (1944) Lord Weary's Castle (1946) The Mills of The Kavanaughs (1951) Life Studies (1959) Phaedra (translation) (1961) Imitations (1961) Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864 (1964) For the Union Dead (1964) The Old Glory (1965) Near the Ocean (1967) R. F. K., 1925-1968 privately printed limited edition (1969) Notebook 1967-1968 (1969) (revised and expanded as Notebook, 1970) The Voyage & other versions of poems of Baudelaire (1969) Prometheus Bound (translation) (1969) Poesie, 1940-1970 (English with Italian translations), Longanesi (Milan), (1972) History (1973) For Lizzie and Harriet (1973) The Dolphin (1973) Selected Poems (1976) (Revised Edition, 1977) Day by Day (1977) The Oresteia of Aeschylus (1978) Collected Prose (1987) Collected Poems (2003)