RobertLowell

Robert Lowell (1917-1977) Robert Lowell was born in 1917 into one of Boston’s oldest and most prominent families. Lowell attended Harvard for two years and then transferred to Kenyon, where he studied poetry. He received his undergrad in 1940. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947. Lowell was a conscientious objector during WWII and protested against the Vietnam War. He suffered from manic depression. Robert died from a heart attack at the age of 60 in 1977. I compared Robert Lowell's poetry to the song Sweater Weather by The Neighbourhood. Sweater Weather I compared Lowell's poetry to Sweater Weather because they both contain imagery. An example of this from Sweater Weather would be, "I hate the beach but I stand in California with my toes in the sand". //Skunk Hour// Nautilus Island's hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son's a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village; she's in her dotage.

media type="custom" key="23043710" align="right" Thirsting for the hierarchie privacy of Queen Victoria's century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall.

The season's ill-- we've lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy decorator brightens his shop for fall; his fishnet's filled with orange cork, orange, his cobbler's bench and awl; there is no money in his work, he'd rather marry.

One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . . My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats, "Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat. . . . I myself am hell; nobody's here--

only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air-- a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail. She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.

Techniques in Skunk Hour:

 * Imagery - visually descriptive or figurative language, esp. in a literary work (the whole poem is full of it)
 * Personification - the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman ("The season's ill...")
 * Rhyme - gives poems flow and rhythm, helping the lyricist tell a story and convey a mood ("fire" with "spire", etc.)
 * === Effect in poem: The imagery adds depth to the poem. The personification helps with description. The rhyme gives the poem flow. ===

//Dolphin// My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise, a captive as Racine, the man of craft, drawn through his maze of iron composition by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre. When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines, the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . . I have sat and listened to too many words of the collaborating muse, and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself-- to ask compassion. . . this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting

my eyes have seen what my hand did.

Techniques in Dolphin:
//The Old Flame// Inside, a new landlord, a new wife, a new broom! Atlantic seaboard antique shop pewter and plunder shone in each room.
 * Personification - the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman ("My Dolphin, you only guide me...")
 * Imagery - visually descriptive or figurative language, esp. in a literary work ("...the incomparable wandering voice of Phédre...")
 * Metaphor - a figure of speech that describes a subject by asserting that it is, on some point of comparison, the same as another otherwise unrelated object ("...this book, half fiction, an eel net made by man for the eel fighting...")
 * === Effect in poem: The personification helps add to the metaphor of the "dolphin". The imagery adds depth to the poem. The metaphor ties in the whole poem and the themes of the poem. ===

media type="custom" key="23043748" align="right" A new frontier! No running next door now to phone the sheriff for his taxi to Bath and the State Liquor Store!

No one saw your ghostly imaginary lover stare through the window and tighten the scarf at his throat.

Health to the new people, health to their flag, to their old restored house on the hill! Everything had been swept bare, furnished, garnished and aired.

Everything's changed for the best - how quivering and fierce we were, there snowbound together, simmering like wasps in our tent of books!

Poor ghost, old love, speak with your old voice of flaming insight that kept us awake all night. In one bed and apart,

we heard the plow groaning up hill - a red light, then a blue, as it tossed off the snow to the side of the road.

Techniques in //The Old Flame://

 * Imagery - visually descriptive or figurative language, esp. in a literary work ("...as it tossed off the snow to the side of the road.")
 * Metaphor - a figure of speech that describes a subject by asserting that it is, on some point of comparison, the same as another otherwise unrelated object (The whole poem is a metaphor)
 * Personification - t<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #212121; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">he attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman ("...we heard the plow groaning up hill...")
 * === Effect in poem: The imagery in the poem adds depth. The metaphor IS the whole poem. The personification gives the objects in the poem more relatable characteristics. ===

Works Cited <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 90%;">"Robert Lowell." Poets.org. The Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2013.