Lord Weary's Castle

by Robert Lowell

Lord Weary's Castle, Robert Lowell's second book of poetry, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947 when Lowell was only thirty. Robert Giroux, who was the publisher of Lowell's wife at the time, Jean Stafford, also became Lowell's publisher after he saw the manuscript for Lord Weary's Castle and was very impressed; he later stated that Lord Weary's Castle was the most successful book of poems that he ever published.

Genres: Poetry

69 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1946

About the author

Robert 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.

Reviews

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

The depth of this book of poems is incredible. I won't pretend to understand it, but there were moments where I was grasping at and glimpsing whatever it was Lowell was offering. I felt like a child reading this, which was both annoying, and beautifully enlightening...

The rhyme and meter and cadence are outstanding. Outstanding. I don't know of any poet who writes this way anymore. He's the last of his kind, and a transitional poet into its current form.

Lowell really draws from the classics - Greek and Latin. I don't know Latin, and wish I did. He'd include a line here and there in his poems. I've never read Virgil, I read Homer... but seriously? I can't remember the half of what he had to say...

He also drew upon the Bible quite heavily. I was never sure about what he was saying though - whether it was religious, or sacrilegious... I know he converted to Catholicism, and then left the Catholic church, but I'm not sure when all of that happened.

The last spring of inspiration for Lowell in this Pulitzer winning classic was U.S. History - the Revolution and Boston in particular.

Now, like I said, I didn't understand all of the classical references, but the Biblical, and Revolutionary - I could at least note that they were there. I wasn't always 100% on their purpose - but even acknowledging them felt like I was connecting with the man.

The book was great. The book was beautiful. I'm surprised so few on here have read it. It's definitely worth looking into.

That and Lowell's life seems pretty intense. Manic depressive on lithium? Imprisoned for being a conscientious objector during WWII? Constantly changing his views on God... If anybody knows a good biography about this guy, send it my way.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the latter part of May
He cut his throat. And though the coroner
Judged him delirious, soon a noisome stir
Palsied our village. At Jehovah's nod
Satan seemed more let loose amongst us: God
Abandoned us to Satan, and he pressed
Us hard, until we thought we could not rest
Till we had done with life. Content was gone.
All the good work was quashed. We were undone.
The breath of God had carried out a planned
And sensible withdrawal from this land;
The multitude, once unconcerned with doubt,
Once neither callous, curious nor devout,
Jumped at broad noon, as though some peddler groaned
At it in its familiar twang: "My friend,
Cut your own throat. Cut your own throat. Now! Now!"

from "After the Surprising Conversions"

Robert Lowell's early collection "Lord Weary's Castle" is my introduction to his poetry. Having recently re-read Sylvia Plath's Colossus, I came across scholars noting her influence by Lowell. So decided to read this early collection which fetched him his first (of two) Pulitzers for Poetry.

It is exhilarating yet exhausting, engaging yet enervating, reading. Without biography notes and scholarly annotations, many of these poems are impossible to parse. The prosody is impeccable--that T.S. Eliot had a hand in editing this collection for publication is no surprise. Lowell's poetry is dense with symbolism and esoteric references ranging from the Biblical and Classical to his own biography. It's erudite poetry written for erudite readers. Screw the uneducated.

There's reward for slow, line-by-line readings, painstakingly deciphering these poems. But are these poems worth the intellectual effort? I'd much rather a closer, slow reading of Elizabeth Bishop or T.S. Eliot to Robert Lowell. However, Lowell has a mesmerizing craft which arrests your attention even when you're not entirely sure what he is going on about. Fault him for his obscurity, sure, but praise him for his prosody. It's a mixed bag.

This collection gives me hope that Lowell is emulating at this point in his career--a career just beginning. What about when he stops trying to please the poetry masters of his time and assumes his own voice? I plan to find out when I read his other Pulitzer Prize winning collection The Dolphin in a few weeks.

"What a dog's life it is to be a king,"
I grumbled and unslung my gun; the chaff
and cinders whipped me and began to sting.
I heard our Monarch's Breughel-peasant laugh
Exploding, as a spaniel mucked with tar
Cut by his Highness' ankles on the double-quick
To fetch its stamping mistress. Louis smashed
Its backbone with a backstroke of his stick:
Slouching a little more than usual, he splashed
As boyish as a stallion to the Champ de Mars.

from "1790 (From the Memoirs of General Thiebault)"

[Lucy Hodgman · Rating 4 out of 5]

favorites: between the porch and the altar, winter in dunbarton, the exile’s return, where the rainbow ends

[Uther Pendragon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems in this book are filled with allusion, symbolism and many more devices.

You may hate this book at first.

But give it a chance. Dig into it, learn what he's trying to tell you, then you will understand why it won the Pulitzer Prize.

[Táda · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poetry of Lord Weary's Castle is extremely pretentious. It is written to be difficult and obscure just for the sake of it, Lowell really worked overtime with his vocabulary, and his allusions, and his cryptic sentences to make it as unlike prose as possible. There is no need to be so enigmatic, and there is certainly no need to use phrases like detritus of death or baroque and prodigal embellishments, to write profound and intellectual poetry.

I want to make clear that this pretentiousness is not to be praised, because it turns out that there is good pretentious poetry and bad pretentious poetry, and Lord Weary's Castle is of the good kind. Of an excellent kind, really. Lowell has a unique voice of stone-cold emotional intensity. The poetry is dense and feverish, and there is depth of both thought and feeling in it, just don't expect to find it in your first or second reading of each poem. Perhaps the most brilliant aspect of the collection is that the poetry appears to be loose in structure while actually maintaining unflinching metre and regular rhyme. It nicely reflects the theme of the collection - to Lowell the world appears to be a chaotic series of violence, so then he tries really, really hard to see a meaningful Catholic order of grace and redemption in it. In that way you can see the order and meaning in his poetry, but you have to try really hard first.

[Wes Benchoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

The English language equivalent of Gordian knots

[Mike Good · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some poems here are quite exceptional, but what he decides to write about and the tone he takes is often off putting.

[Melissa McClintock]

this has the edited version of "children of light", but follows an earlier chapbook version which I cannot locate thru goodreads. It was published privately. The later line " And candles gutter by an empty altar," is previously And candles gutter in a hall of mirrors. i would like to have both versions yeah right ..

[Suzanne · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't do it. It is VERY RARE that I will not persevere to the end of even a bad book. But I just couldn't take any more, not with so much lovely poetry around. I think you have to take a class, probably with Lowell, to get any of this. I am not interested in poetry that is so inaccessible!

[j_ay · Rating 4 out of 5]

An astounding use of meter and rhyme, but sadly (very sadly) every poem is plagued with an abundance of Catholic nonsense.
Further proof that religion is the worst thing man has ever invented and that it ruins everything.

[Prisoner 071053 · Rating 4 out of 5]

So masterful of rhythm, sound, and allusional texture that I hardly ever cared to know the meaning. This is what Stevens would have been if he'd been good at the technical aspects of poetry.