Robert Lowell struggled all his life to elude his rarefied Boston heritage

The American poet Robert Lowell (1917-77) was a so-called ‘Boston Brahmin’, a Lowell of Boston, where, in the widely known distich, ‘the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God’. (In 1923, when one Harry H. Kabotchnik, against furious protests from the Cabots, succeeded in getting his name changed, this briefly became ‘and the Cabots speak Yiddish, by God’.)

It was this mostly rarefied background, seething with Lowells and Starks and Winslows and Devereux (though both his parents, like himself, were only children, so they feel like an unhappy nuclear family in the embrace of a clan), that the poet tried many times to elude: by leaving Harvard for Kenyon College in Ohio; by converting to Catholicism; by becoming a conscientious objector in the last year of the war; by marrying young, and divorcing and remarrying; in his recurring episodes of mania and depression that caused frequent hospitalisations; and not least in his personal and reportorial and factual poetry.