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Perhaps the most versatile American intellectual of the nineteenth century, James Russell Lowell was a vital force in American literature and thought. He excelled in an impressive range of pursuits: lyric poet, satirist, literary critic, political essayist, magazine editor, professor of belles lettres, and diplomat. Lowell became in his own time an influential arbiter of literary taste and value and a widely read and internationally respected man of letters.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

The Magazine Pioneer

James Russell Lowell was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 22, 1819, the youngest of six children of Rev. Charles Russell Lowell, a Unitarian minister, and Harriet Spence Lowell. Throughout his life, he belonged to the proud, genteel society of the Boston Brahmins, a group descended from the original settlers of New England. Educated according to the best standards of the day, in due time he entered Harvard College. He neglected his class work and got in trouble for high-spirited antics, but he edited the campus literary magazine. His classmates elected him to recite the annual poem on the eve of commencement, but he was suspended before he could deliver the oration. Instead, the Class Poem (1838) became his first publication.

Lacking a clear career objective, Lowell earned a degree from Harvard Law School and set up practice in Boston. After six months, he abandoned the idea and gambled on finding a literary livelihood. He published a volume of poetry, A Year’s Life, in 1841, and a second collection in 1844, and contributed verses to a number of magazines. Periodicals had begun wielding a far-reaching influence on American culture in the 1840s. Lowell began a high-minded magazine himself, the Pioneer, in 1843, and solicited contributions from an impressive group of writers; Edgar Allan Poe introduced his story ”The Tell-Tale Heart” in its pages. Unfortunately, the publication went under after three issues.

Lowell married Maria White, the daughter of a prosperous merchant, in late 1844, just as his first book of literary criticism, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets (1845), was being printed. Under his wife’s influence, Lowell became increasingly interested and active in political affairs, notably the movement to abolish slavery. He wrote scores of articles and poems, both satirical and polemical, in defense of abolition and other reform causes in the 1840s.

Biglow and A Fable for Critics

Between 1846 and 1848, in the National Anti-Slavery Standard and the abolitionist Boston Courier, appeared Lowell’s most important work of this period, the verses of his persona Hosea Biglow. The use of the rustic Yankee as a voice of political reason was not original with Lowell; John Adams had created the character Humphrey Plough jogger back in the 1760s. Lowell’s contribution was in turning the figure into a memorable poet. Using humor and dialect, Lowell launched a forceful satire against the Mexican War, which Congress declared in May 1846 and which the abolitionists, among others, viewed as immoral. In Lowell’s view, the aggression against Mexico, and the prior annexation of Texas—which had once been territory belonging to Mexico—were means to extend slavery westward and further cement its pernicious role in American life. The verses of Hosea Biglow were an immediate success, and later compiled in book form as The Biglow Papers (1848).

Also in 1848, Lowell published a romantic narrative poem, The Vision of Sir Launfal; another poetry collection; and one of his most lasting works, A Fable for Critics, a versified commentary on America’s contemporary writers. His satirical caricatures of his fellow wordsmiths are bitingly incisive; Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, was incensed by these couplets: ”There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge / Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge… / Who has written some things quite the best of their kind / But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind.” The volume quickly sold out three editions and established its author as a wry, audacious observer of the literary scene.

Position at Harvard

In the space of a few years between 1847 and 1852, James and Maria Lowell lost three of their four children; Maria herself died in 1853, leaving Lowell distraught. The joy he found in his sole surviving daughter sustained him, and he made his study a place of refuge and recreation, reading for twelve or more hours a day. He shared the first fruits of this solitary education when he was invited to give a lecture series at the Lowell Institute in Boston in 1855. The overseers at Harvard were so impressed that midway through his twelve lectures, the college offered Lowell the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages, vacated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s retirement. Lowell prepared himself for the post with a year of diligent study in Europe, leaving his daughter in the care of a governess, Frances Dunlap. After returning to Cambridge and joining the Harvard faculty, Lowell and Dunlap were married.

Lowell helped to found the Atlantic Monthly in the fall of 1857 and became the magazine’s first editor, as well as a principal contributor. Under his guidance, the Atlantic Monthly set a high mark both for its literary standards and its courageous and outspoken coverage of public affairs, as the nation teetered on the brink of civil war. The dispute between Union and Confederate supporters focused on the rights of states to govern themselves, though the main point of contention was a state’s right to practice slavery. Lowell gave up the editorship of the magazine just as the fighting was breaking out, but he continued to submit poetry and prose.

He became coeditor of the North American Review, a staid Boston literary journal, in 1863, contributing essays in support of Abraham Lincoln’s stewardship of the Union, as well as critical articles on authors such as William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Dante Alighieri. The war inspired him to write a second, more somber series of The Biglow Papers (1862). After the cessation of hostilities and the assassination of Lincoln, Lowell composed and publicly recited an ode commemorating graduates of Harvard who served in the war.

In 1870 the literature professor collected six of his best North American Review essays in his first major work of criticism, Among My Books. This volume was an enormous success, going through over thirty printings in Lowell’s lifetime. Its successor, My Study Windows (1871), sold even better and brought its author to the peak of his fame as a critic.

Diplomatic Service

Lowell continued to write essays and satirical poetry in the 1870s. One such effort, ”Tempora Mutantur” (1875)—meaning ”times have changed”— denounces the corruption that had become synonymous with American politics during the Gilded Age. He entered the political arena in 1876 as a delegate to the Republican convention supporting Rutherford B. Hayes, who won in that year’s disputed presidential election. Hayes appointed Lowell ambassador to Spain in 1877; after three years in Madrid, he moved to London as Minister to England. During his long stay in Europe and after his return home in 1885, he fulfilled his role as America’s foremost man of letters by addressing varied audiences on both political and literary subjects. His orations, such as an influential one on ”Democracy” (1884), and other writings were collected in several books, including a ten-volume compendium, in his final years. He died on August 12, 1891, in the house in which he was born.

Works in Literary Context

Lowell’s wide-ranging intellect absorbed all sorts of influences in cosmopolitan fashion. From his mother he acquired a taste for stories and poetry, and he read widely from an early age. His many critical writings leave a detailed impression of his overall aesthetic. In reviewing literature, he customarily ”ranked” poets and judged them against his list of ”five indispensable authors”: Homer, Dante, Miguel de Cervantes, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Shakespeare.

Lowell as Humorist

One consistent element of Lowell’s literary productions is humor. It is never absent from his best poetry, essays, and letters, and its range is as varied as the occasions that elicited it—witty and learned sometimes, boisterous and close to bawdy at others, and always displaying a skeptical, ironic perspective. Of all his writings, the one most often remembered by posterity is his grand literary joke, A Fable for Critics, which he wrote for the sheer fun of it. The Biglow Papers ranks among the finest political satires in American literature, and its sophisticated use of vernacular dialect inspired later humorists such as Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken.

Public Poetry

Throughout his life Lowell attempted to master a lyrical poetic voice, but his efforts were excessively literary, often didactic, and occasionally awkward and forced. As a public poet, however, both in his satiric verse and his Pindaric odes, Lowell has few equals in American literature. He believed that the poet’s role in society is to feel and express the deep meaning of the present. The Biglow poems reflect his intention to employ poetry to contribute to the debate on central social issues. At this aim they succeeded handsomely; in the opinion of Lowell’s fellow abolitionist, John Greenleaf Whittier, ”the world-wide laugh” caused by the rustic Yankee poet was enough to ”have shaken half the walls of Slavery down.” Following the Civil War, Lowell lived increasingly in the public eye. In poems like the Commemoration Ode (1865) and The Cathedral (1870), he spoke nobly and effectively in a manner that can be compared to Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871).

The Critical Habit

Lowell stands alongside Edgar Allan Poe as one of the two most important literary critics America produced before the Civil War. Much more than Poe, Lowell became an influential judge of taste, a popular and erudite spokesman for the best in American culture. He wrote major essays on dozens of authors, each revealing his vast learning. Yet his criticism was impressionistic, driven by no overriding theoretical viewpoint. One of the clearest statements of his orientation comes from a manuscript fragment called ”Criticism and Culture” (unpublished until 1969): ”The object of all criticism is not to criticize, but to understand…. Above all, criticism is useful in inducing a judicial habit of mind, and teaching us to keep our intellectual tempers.” As one of the century’s most distinguished American men of letters, this ”judicial habit of mind” was perhaps his most profound legacy.

Works in Critical Context

The early reception to Lowell’s poetic offerings was uneven; while he received recognition and wide publication in periodicals, a few people were not impressed. Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson were among those who found his poetry wanting. Although he rose to international fame, Lowell was not in any respect a popular writer. Most readers considered his poetry too difficult; his literary essays appealed to a relatively small class of readers; and his political essays, topical in nature, were not designed to be lasting literary works. It was the combination of his talents that made him eminent—that and a certain quality of character not necessarily reflected on the printed page. Another literary eminence, William Dean Howells, wrote of Lowell: ”I knew and felt his greatness somehow apart from the literary proofs of it…. He ruled my fancy and held my allegiance as a character, as a man.”

By the early twentieth century, little of the writing Lowell left behind was much read. His reputation had become a matter of received opinion, and that reputation declined significantly in the twentieth century. Modernists and New Critics tended to dismiss him as the embodiment of an outmoded, genteel tradition. In the present era, scholarly interest in Lowell centers on his cultural contributions rather than his literary merits. His works of criticism have received due regard from literary historians, but aside from the satirical Biglow Papers, his creative writing has been neglected by contemporary readers and critics.

A Fable for Critics

Given the subject matter of A Fable for Critics (1848), it is no surprise the amount of attention the work received from critics and writers when it was published. However, it was not necessarily Lowell himself who received the credit or blame, since the original edition of the book did not carry the author’s name—perhaps for fear of repercussion. Despite the original author’s anonymity, Poe has no trouble naming the source in his review for the Southern Literary Messenger, and its authorship was likely common knowledge soon after publication. The work offered humorous portrayals of many contemporary writers, and the witty gibes made by Lowell sometimes landed on their mark more heavily than he may have expected. Edgar Allan Poe, for example, did not seem to respond well to his portrayal. In his scathing review, he calls the book ”ill-conceived and feebly executed, as well in detail as in general.” Poe declares, ”We laugh not so much at the author’s victims as at himself, for letting them put him in such a passion.” Poe also takes Lowell to task for his antislavery bias: ”Mr. L has not the common honesty to speak well, even in a literary sense, of any man who is not a ranting Abolitionist.” He concludes that the book is so ”feeble” and ”weakly constructed” that Lowell has ”lowered himself at least fifty percent in the literary public opinion.”

Francis Bowen, writing for North American Review, is far more complimentary, calling it ”a very pleasant and sparkling poem, abounding in flashes of brilliant satire, edged with wit enough to delight even its victims.” Though Bowen does find fault with several elements of the book—including the introduction, the author’s choice of subjects, and his too-frequent reliance upon puns, which he calls ”wit’s bastard offspring”—he nonetheless praises Lowell’s audacity to lampoon both authors and critics. It is worth noting that, in A Fable for Critics, the anonymous author offers a criticism of himself, noting: ”The top of the hill he will ne’er come nigh reaching / Till he learns the distinction ‘twixt singing and preaching.”

References:

Beatty, Richmond Croom. James Russell Lowell. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1952.
Blair, Walter. Horse Sense in American Humor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942.
Duberman, Martin. James Russell Lowell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.
Foerster, Norman. American Criticism: A Study in Literary Theory from Poe to the Present. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928.
Hale, Edward Everett. James Russell Lowell and His Friends. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899.
Heymann, C. David. American Aristocracy: The Lives and Times of James Russell, Amy, and Robert Lowell. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980.
Howard, Leon. Victorian Knight-Errant: A Study of the Early Literary Career of James Russell Lowell.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952.
Howells, William Dean. Literary Friends and Acquaintance. New York: Harper, 1900.
”James Russell Lowell (1819-1891).” Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Edited by Laurie Lanzen Harris. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale Research, 1982, pp. 504-506.
Rourke, Constance. American Humor: A Study in National Character. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931.
Scudder, Horace Elisha. James Russell Lowell: A Biography (two volumes). Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901.