At a young age, James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) could have chosen multiple career paths, but he decided to follow his passion for the written word he had acquired in his youth. His unique flair for using humanity and nature in his poetry helped him become one of the most famous “fireside poets” of the 19th century. He wrote simply, and families recited his poems as they gathered around the hearth. Through his work, Lowell became one of the most influential poets and abolitionists of his time.
Lowell was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1819 to a Unitarian minister. He attended Harvard at 15, but he was a horrible student who often skipped class and got into trouble. While attending college, he became class poet. Later, he was admitted to the bar after taking just a single law class.
After he graduated in 1838, Lowell had to choose between becoming a lawyer, businessman, or preacher like his father. He chose instead to continue writing poetry.
In 1844, Lowell married fellow poet Maria White, who inspired him to keep writing. He began using the power of the pen to write for anti-slavery publications like the Anti-Slavery Standard and the Pennsylvania Freeman.
A portrait of James Russell Lowell, 1844; a daguerreotype taken in Philadelphia. (Public Domain)
Publications
In 1843, Lowell joined forces with his friend Robert Carter and founded a literary magazine called The Pioneer. The publication’s major claim to fame was that it was the first to publish Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” But after only three issues, the magazine had to cease operations. Lowell caught an eye disease that made him temporarily blind and Carter mismanaged the business while Lowell was absent.Though discouraged, Lowell’s wife urged him to continue writing. Lowell worked as a writer and editor for numerous publications before writing his most famous piece, “A Fable for Critics,” anonymously in 1848.
The book-length poem satirizes critics and other poets of the era, and it quickly sold out the first 3,000 copies printed. “So the excellent Public is hereby assured that the sale of my book is already secured,” Lowell wrote in the Prefatory Note in “A Fable for Critics.” He added:
“For there is not a poet throughout the whole land but will purchase a copy or two out of hand, in the fond expectation of being amused in it, by seeing his betters cut up and abused in it. Now, I find, by a pretty exact calculation, there are something like ten thousand bards in the nation, of that special variety whom the Review and Magazine critics call lofty and true, and about thirty thousand (this tribe is increasing) of the kinds who are termed full of promise and pleasing.”
That same year, Lowell published the “Biglow Papers,” which criticized the country’s involvement in the Mexican-American War, and war in general. Lowell continued writing for the next several years. He became a professor of literature and modern languages at Harvard after giving a series of lectures on the English poets.
The Atlantic Monthly
Cover of The Atlantic Monthly, 1857. (Public Domain)
In the fall of 1857, Lowell became the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly (now known as The Atlantic), a position he would hold for the next four years. “When the Atlantic Monthly was founded, its conductors did not conceal their intention to make it a political magazine,” author Horace Scudder wrote in “James Russell Lowell: A Biography” published in 1901.
“It bore as its sub-head a title it has never relinquished, ‘A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics’: The combination under Lowell’s superintendence did not de-note that articles were to be grouped under these heads; it intimated that in the attitude taken by the magazine both art and politics were to be discussed by men having the literary faculty, and that apprehension of subjects which finds its natural training not exclusively in practice and affairs but in acquaintance with great literature which is, after all, the express image of art and politics. Thus, the magazine did not become, as it might in lesser hands, a mere propaganda of reform, or the organ of a political party, neither did it assume the air of philosophical absenteeism,” the author said.
Even though he was a pacifist, Lowell supported the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. After helping President Rutherford B. Hayes get elected in 1877, he was awarded with an appointment minister to the court of Spain.
Lowell then served as minister to England before returning home in 1885. He passed away from cancer in 1891 after suffering for months from gout, chronic nausea, and sciatica.
A memorial plaque to James Russell Lowell by the sculptor George Frampton located in the vestibule of the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey, London. (AddtInfo/CC BY-SA 4.0)
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