Poetry in motion
It was a very poetic thing to do, departing Harvard to live in a tent. Robert Lowell — of the aristocratic Boston Lowells, an illustrious family that even included one of Harvard’s past presidents, A. Lawrence Lowell — propped his pup tent on the Tennessee lawn of poet Allen Tate, who would become one of the young writer’s great mentors. Lowell finished his schooling at Kenyon College in 1940, but returned to Harvard for readings and to teach, which he did off and on until his death from a heart attack in 1977. Along the way, he won two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Poet Nicholas Christopher ’73 remembers Lowell’s 1969 workshop, which Lowell let him into even though he was a freshman. Writing in the publication Critical Mass, Christopher recalled that “unlike any other class I ever took, the auditors who attended each week...