Robert Lowell
(March 1, 1917 - September 12, 1977)

The Dolly Madison House, 721 Madison Place NW, Lafayette Park neighborhood, DC.
Marked with an historic plaque.

Lowell rented a room in what was then the Cosmos Club, a private men's club, at this location, while serving as the sixth US Poet Laureate in 1947-48. The building is now the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and a National Historic Landmark.

Lowell is the author of 16 books of poems, including: Lord Weary's Castle (1946), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize; Life Studies (1959), which won the National Book Award, and which the Academy of American Poets has called "a watershed collection...which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry"; and The Dolphin (1973), which won him a second Pulitzer. He is widely considered a founder of the movement known as Confessionalism.

Lowell had numerous mental breakdowns and was frequently hospitalized for manic depressive illness. Lowell taught at several universities: the University of Iowa, Boston University, University of Cincinnati, Harvard, and the New School for Social Research. He was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during WWII, and later protested against the Vietnam War, and was arrested in a Peace March in Washington, DC in October 1967. In addition to serving as US Poet Laureate, he was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977.

Author photo courtesy of Library of Congress.