Lord Weary's Castle
by Robert Lowell
Summary
Lord Weary's Castle was Robert Lowell's second book, published in 1946 when he was not yet thirty, and it revises five poems from his 1944 debut, Land of Unlikeness, alongside new work that includes some of Lowell's earliest loose translations, drawn from Rimbaud, Rilke and Valéry. Most of the poems are set in New England, and Lowell uses that landscape, its graveyards, its coastline, its Puritan inheritance, to work through what critics have described as a conflict of opposites running through the whole book: necessity against freedom, damnation against grace, a tension sharpened by Lowell's own recent conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism.
The book's best known poem, The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, elegizes a cousin lost at sea during the war and turns that private grief into a meditation on New England's whaling and Puritan past at the same time. Elsewhere, In Memory of Arthur Winslow and Mary Winslow mourn Lowell's own maternal grandparents, while Rebellion draws directly on a physical fight Lowell once had with his father, and Colloquy in Black Rock and After the Surprising Conversions extend the same historically layered, personally charged method across different settings.
Lowell writes in a rigorously formal style, dense meter and exact rhyme handled under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Criticism, producing lines critic Louise Bogan called capable of a high pitch of baroque intensity, closer to John Donne or Herman Melville than to the plainer American verse of some contemporaries. Reading it means working through poems that are demanding on a first pass and reward rereading, since the historical and religious material underneath the personal grief takes real attention to surface. It suits a reader drawn to New England's Puritan and maritime past read through a young poet's own family losses and religious searching.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Robert Lowell the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Lord Weary's Castle, published the previous year, when Lowell was only thirty years old. His editor, Robert Giroux, later called it the most successful book of poems Lowell ever published, and the prize established him almost immediately as a major figure in American poetry.
Critic Randall Jarrell reported that many reviewers felt the book was as much of an event as Auden's first book had been, and both Louise Bogan and John Berryman offered similarly strong endorsements at the time. Lowell went on to a long, often turbulent career, and would win a second Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1974, for The Dolphin, making him one of relatively few poets to win the prize twice. Lord Weary's Castle remains the book most closely tied to his earliest, most formally intense period, before his later turn toward the looser confessional style of Life Studies.