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Lord Weary's Castle; The Mills of the Kavanaughs
A combined edition of the poet's early work, including Lord Weary's Castle, a collection of forty-two short poems, which won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize, and The Mills of the Kavanaughs, a narrative poem of six hundred lines, and five other long poems.
132 pages, Paperback
First published March 20, 1968
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About the author
Robert Lowell
182 books269 followersRobert Lowell, born Robert Traill Spence Lowell, IV, was an American poet whose works, confessional in nature, engaged with the questions of history and probed the dark recesses of the self. He is generally considered to be among the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.
His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.
Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.
Partly in response to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of such younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-fifties began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (1959), which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, much as Eliot's The Waste Land had three decades before.
Considered by many to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century, Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results, all along defining the restless center of American poetry, until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 60. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977.
His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.
Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized.
Partly in response to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of such younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-fifties began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (1959), which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, much as Eliot's The Waste Land had three decades before.
Considered by many to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century, Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results, all along defining the restless center of American poetry, until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 60. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 7, 2025
My frustrated self LOVED Lowell in 1970.
A well-heeled loser like me (both of us square pegs in an increasingly liberalized and woke world) and also guilty of Catholic faith, he had found private peccadiloes make for profitable publishing.
No one yet knew that in the McCarthyist Era.
But even an eminent writer as noted as Irwin Shaw could be faddish cannon fodder for the witchhunts, and, of course, "the State had its reasons," as Lowell wrote with a grain of salt.
Though certainly no beat like Ginsberg, Lowell knew as well what's bin did and what's bin hid - and rubs it in here!
His wrath is intense. For he had been bombed and strafed full of holes in confinement for his mental condition - like me - and he would be to the end.
His schizoid drive told him to take no prisoners with his acid pen.
Later, thankfully, and again like me, in later years his anger found refuge - and a sense of safe containment - under the carapace of Catholic ritual.
Dense, prolix and arcane, his poems were to die for. Confessional Lit was born.
Loser, huh?
His own Confessor knew him better.
He was a Saint.
A totally fractured one, perhaps in the mold of Faustina, he put his ALL into his verse. And what verse! As ruggedly Nor' Easterly, and as tormented as Melville!
And just as he famously wrote "my heart, beat faster, faster," so he suddenly collapsed and died of a coronary in the back seat of a speeding Manhattan taxicab, far too young.
'Pecunia radix malorum est' for him.... yet he could only counter his unease with good old Catholic guilt.
Yes, his family was wealthy. You may say he fell into the wrong crowd at Harvard, but consider the territory at the time. At least he saw the truth.
He saw between the cracks. AND lent his jagged fire to the next generation, of which Sylvia Plath was preeminent.
And he could never stop writing.
During one of his episodes his doc shook his head in wonder: "Unbelievable breakdown! Unbelievable recovery!"
Yes, Bob, you were incredible.
And Few these sad days dare go where you have gone - to the River Styx and back again - but thank Heaven you are now, above this mindless chaos, sanctified by peace.
A well-heeled loser like me (both of us square pegs in an increasingly liberalized and woke world) and also guilty of Catholic faith, he had found private peccadiloes make for profitable publishing.
No one yet knew that in the McCarthyist Era.
But even an eminent writer as noted as Irwin Shaw could be faddish cannon fodder for the witchhunts, and, of course, "the State had its reasons," as Lowell wrote with a grain of salt.
Though certainly no beat like Ginsberg, Lowell knew as well what's bin did and what's bin hid - and rubs it in here!
His wrath is intense. For he had been bombed and strafed full of holes in confinement for his mental condition - like me - and he would be to the end.
His schizoid drive told him to take no prisoners with his acid pen.
Later, thankfully, and again like me, in later years his anger found refuge - and a sense of safe containment - under the carapace of Catholic ritual.
Dense, prolix and arcane, his poems were to die for. Confessional Lit was born.
Loser, huh?
His own Confessor knew him better.
He was a Saint.
A totally fractured one, perhaps in the mold of Faustina, he put his ALL into his verse. And what verse! As ruggedly Nor' Easterly, and as tormented as Melville!
And just as he famously wrote "my heart, beat faster, faster," so he suddenly collapsed and died of a coronary in the back seat of a speeding Manhattan taxicab, far too young.
'Pecunia radix malorum est' for him.... yet he could only counter his unease with good old Catholic guilt.
Yes, his family was wealthy. You may say he fell into the wrong crowd at Harvard, but consider the territory at the time. At least he saw the truth.
He saw between the cracks. AND lent his jagged fire to the next generation, of which Sylvia Plath was preeminent.
And he could never stop writing.
During one of his episodes his doc shook his head in wonder: "Unbelievable breakdown! Unbelievable recovery!"
Yes, Bob, you were incredible.
And Few these sad days dare go where you have gone - to the River Styx and back again - but thank Heaven you are now, above this mindless chaos, sanctified by peace.
February 2, 2022
Death, the engraver, puts forth his bone foot
And Grace-with-wings and Time-on-wings compel
All this antique abandon of the disgraced
To face Jehovah’s buffets and his ends.
I'm bone-weary. We are going to close for a few days from the plague and a fear of ice. Lowell was a titan. His was a patience of a geological scale. He was likely as flawed as most, susceptible to the actor-observer conundrum. I may have to leave him now. I will be back.
And Grace-with-wings and Time-on-wings compel
All this antique abandon of the disgraced
To face Jehovah’s buffets and his ends.
I'm bone-weary. We are going to close for a few days from the plague and a fear of ice. Lowell was a titan. His was a patience of a geological scale. He was likely as flawed as most, susceptible to the actor-observer conundrum. I may have to leave him now. I will be back.
September 30, 2008
I made the mistake of trying to read this collection while reading another book. These are very demanding poems, and I had to go back and reread many of them. That said, the reading experience left me feeling like I’d just had a November dip in the North Atlantic. These are dark, cold, and troubled poems. Perhaps I’m projecting what little I remember of Lowell troubled life from a biography I read many years ago, but I don’t think so. Don’t get me wrong, in a formal sense, I’d say these are outstanding poems, filled with language and images and sounds that are as thick as (cold) chowder. Consider these few from “At the Indian Killer’s Grave.”
Behind King’s Chapel what the earth has kept
Whole from the jerking noose of time extends
Its dark enigma to Jehosophat;
Or will King Philip plait
The just man’s scalp in the wailing valley! Friends,
Blacker than these black stones the subway bends
About the dirty elm roots and the well
For the unchristened infants in the waste
Of the great garden rotten to its root;
Death, the engraver, puts forth his bone foot
And Grace-with-wings and Time-on-wings compel
All this antique abandon of the disgraced
To face Jehovah’s buffets and his ends.
Chilly stuff. Actually, for me, considering the tone established, I had this stanza ending with “foot.” The Old Testament damning that follows in the next three lines are unnecessary, poetry filler if you will. The entire “Lord Weary” portion of the collection is similar in tone. Some are more accessible than others. I’m a big fan of historical allusions in poems, but Lowell stumped me a number of times, and given what I had just read, more often than not, I didn’t feel the desire to perform the heavy lifting required to peel back a problem poem’s layers of meaning. I was probably cheating myself, but I often found myself yearning for sunnier poetry pastures, since I found Lowell’s poetry haunted, claustrophobic, and cryptic. (A good accompanying text would be Hawthorne’s “Custom House” chapter from The Scarlet Letter.)
Interestingly, I found a blurb on the back of my copy by Howard Moss, that called Lowell a “religious poet.” I guess that’s true, since religion and history dominate the subject matter of the poems, but perhaps a more accurate tag would state that these are poems about Faith – and the loss of it. Lowell had little use for his Puritan roots, and converted to Catholicism. But the Catholicism I found in these poems are basically nods to hopefully comforting rituals and figures. An early example of Lowell’s not really buying into the Catholic thing can be found in the “Our Lady of Walsingham” portion of the remarkable “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” sequence:
Our Lady, too small for her canopy,
Sits near the altar. There’s no comeliness
At all or charm in that expressionless
Face with its heavy eyelids.
The real presence here is in fact not Mary, but Melville’s Whale, its Whiteness, and wrapped up in that are both writers’ complaints against God, and his silence:
This face, for centuries a memory,
Non est species, neque decor,
Expressionless, expresses God;
Lowell, like Melville, in his writing at least, was a man of the sea. And the most powerful image in this collection, one that hung with me throughout, is in the first section of the same “Nantucket” sequence. In it, Lowell tells of the retrieval of a dead sailor, his cousin. The description is a stark one:
The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,
Its open, staring eyes
Were lustreless dead-lights
Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk
Heavy with sand.
Given the preceding lines, as well as what follows next, the various associations one could make regarding the sea, sailors (fishermen), God, etc., I couldn’t help but feel this poetic description is a close, and knowing, match to Manet’s painting “Dead Christ.” Lowell was a great, but tormented poet. One can only hope that at some point he found a measure of peace.
Behind King’s Chapel what the earth has kept
Whole from the jerking noose of time extends
Its dark enigma to Jehosophat;
Or will King Philip plait
The just man’s scalp in the wailing valley! Friends,
Blacker than these black stones the subway bends
About the dirty elm roots and the well
For the unchristened infants in the waste
Of the great garden rotten to its root;
Death, the engraver, puts forth his bone foot
And Grace-with-wings and Time-on-wings compel
All this antique abandon of the disgraced
To face Jehovah’s buffets and his ends.
Chilly stuff. Actually, for me, considering the tone established, I had this stanza ending with “foot.” The Old Testament damning that follows in the next three lines are unnecessary, poetry filler if you will. The entire “Lord Weary” portion of the collection is similar in tone. Some are more accessible than others. I’m a big fan of historical allusions in poems, but Lowell stumped me a number of times, and given what I had just read, more often than not, I didn’t feel the desire to perform the heavy lifting required to peel back a problem poem’s layers of meaning. I was probably cheating myself, but I often found myself yearning for sunnier poetry pastures, since I found Lowell’s poetry haunted, claustrophobic, and cryptic. (A good accompanying text would be Hawthorne’s “Custom House” chapter from The Scarlet Letter.)
Interestingly, I found a blurb on the back of my copy by Howard Moss, that called Lowell a “religious poet.” I guess that’s true, since religion and history dominate the subject matter of the poems, but perhaps a more accurate tag would state that these are poems about Faith – and the loss of it. Lowell had little use for his Puritan roots, and converted to Catholicism. But the Catholicism I found in these poems are basically nods to hopefully comforting rituals and figures. An early example of Lowell’s not really buying into the Catholic thing can be found in the “Our Lady of Walsingham” portion of the remarkable “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” sequence:
Our Lady, too small for her canopy,
Sits near the altar. There’s no comeliness
At all or charm in that expressionless
Face with its heavy eyelids.
The real presence here is in fact not Mary, but Melville’s Whale, its Whiteness, and wrapped up in that are both writers’ complaints against God, and his silence:
This face, for centuries a memory,
Non est species, neque decor,
Expressionless, expresses God;
Lowell, like Melville, in his writing at least, was a man of the sea. And the most powerful image in this collection, one that hung with me throughout, is in the first section of the same “Nantucket” sequence. In it, Lowell tells of the retrieval of a dead sailor, his cousin. The description is a stark one:
The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,
Its open, staring eyes
Were lustreless dead-lights
Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk
Heavy with sand.
Given the preceding lines, as well as what follows next, the various associations one could make regarding the sea, sailors (fishermen), God, etc., I couldn’t help but feel this poetic description is a close, and knowing, match to Manet’s painting “Dead Christ.” Lowell was a great, but tormented poet. One can only hope that at some point he found a measure of peace.
September 25, 2023
Lowell is a master of his craft but I am just beginning to get into poetry. Lots of the biblical and Homeric references went over my head but deserve attention when I reread this collection (someday)
September 17, 2024
I never know what to say about poets, but I love this collection
November 9, 2015
I've always thought of Lowell as more of a confessional poet, but this work echoes the religious poems of the Puritans of early New England.
July 24, 2024
Published in 1946 and 1951 respectively, Lord Weary's Castle and The Mills of the Kavanaughs are among the earliest and most demanding of poet Robert Lowell's works. Both of these books are marked by an intense commitment to the rituals, symbolism, and social justice tradition of the Catholic faith, as well as a marked propensity for the ironic referencing of classical (Greco-Roman) poetics and a fairly strict adherence to the pentameter's rhythm. For those readers who might be inclined to look to the example of Lowell's faith as a source of solace or a means of bracing up their own beliefs, (more especially in the first collection), it's true that there will be little enough to find in the way of redemptive uplift here. In his early days as a poet Lowell was repeatedly drawn to themes and images of violence as they defined the experience of World War II, ("The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket", "The Exile's Return"), the established nuances of Catholic practice and history, ("New Year's Day"), and sometimes most powerfully both at once, ("The Massacre of the Innocents"). The preoccupation with violence will take a more personal turn as Lowell singles out the bloody legacy of his own ancestors ("At the Indian Killer's Grave").
In the second collection, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Lowell's introduction of violent themes, (most especially in the title poem and the book's final one "Thanksgiving's Over"), threatens to overwhelm his control of the subject matter in each instance while symbols, (drawn both from Ovid's mythology as well as Catholic dogma), add more confusion than clarity to the proceedings. However, even with these complaints in mind, Robert Lowell remains much too good a poet to write something entirely bad in these poems, (or in the rest of the collection), and the initial bird images of the latter poem will remind some readers of lines from his farewell to Catholicism, "Beyond the Alps", in Life Studies. Readers would be well advised to read these books in the annotated Robert Lowell: Collected Poems. While the notes are not always as complete as one would hope, they are usually very helpful.
In the second collection, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Lowell's introduction of violent themes, (most especially in the title poem and the book's final one "Thanksgiving's Over"), threatens to overwhelm his control of the subject matter in each instance while symbols, (drawn both from Ovid's mythology as well as Catholic dogma), add more confusion than clarity to the proceedings. However, even with these complaints in mind, Robert Lowell remains much too good a poet to write something entirely bad in these poems, (or in the rest of the collection), and the initial bird images of the latter poem will remind some readers of lines from his farewell to Catholicism, "Beyond the Alps", in Life Studies. Readers would be well advised to read these books in the annotated Robert Lowell: Collected Poems. While the notes are not always as complete as one would hope, they are usually very helpful.
July 29, 2021
Catholic without being overly spiritual, and angsty without being overly depressing. This book left me asking some very important questions. The most important among those questions being- "Why did I read this again?"
November 25, 2008
I'm currently reading this. I think that, for all his faults and excesses, Lowell had the greatest verbal facility of any poet writing in English. His rhymes just flow. His subjects come glancing at you like shrapnel. "The Mills of the Kavanaughs" is hypnotic, whether it ultimately makes any "sense" or not. I'm still immersed in it, it's like making a friend for life.
Want to read
November 27, 2008The Yankee Faulkner! I'm excited.
February 9, 2009
I'm reading the first half of this for a literature class. I really enjoyed the formalism of Lord Weary's Castle.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews