Arthur Winslow (In Memory of Arthur Winslow)
Arthur Winslow was the poet's grandfather, a man whom he refers to in the twisted vagaries of poetic license as "his father." But the complicated relationship there was the result of a domination of personality and not necessary an indication of affection.
Hart Crane (Words for Hart Crane)
Hart Crane is an American poet who preceded Robert Lowell whom the poet suggests is the Shelley of his own age. The poem begins with a savage attack upon the Pulitzer Prize committees of the past for honoring “dopes” and “screws” while overlooking Crane.
Colonel Robert Shaw (For the Union Dead)
Robert Shaw was the commander 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment which consisted of black soldiers fighting for the Union against the Confederacy. Shaw and his story have long been well known to Bostonians as the result of a memorial central to the working out of the poem’s them. Their story became famous around the world as a result of the Oscar-winning film Glory. Here, the heroic deeds of local hero Shaw and his soldiers are juxtaposed against rising number of conflicts of the monuments of the past fighting for space with more modern needs like more parking availability.
Lady Caroline Blackwood
Blackwood figures most prominently in the poems collected in the volume titled The Dolphin. Published in 1973, the book is not just a mere collection of previously published poems, but a thematically linked and narratively structured account (highly confessional and very controversial) of Lowell’s relationship with Caroline Blackwood which broke up his first marriage and resulted in the birth of a child. The Dolphin would also give birth to Lowell’s second Pulitzer Prize.
Jonathan Edwards (Mr. Edwards and the Spider)
The colonial Puritan minister notorious for the terrifying effect his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” had upon parishioners is a featured character in a poem based a real life event. When Edwards was just 11 years old, his observation of the behavior patterns of spiders led the child to produce a scientific essay of analysis what would become known as “ballooning” in which spiders seem to fly through the air. The essay was a deemed to be of a caliber suitable for publication. Lowell’s poem fuses that early scientific interest in spiders with the minister who would exploit the general public’s fear of spiders as a terrifying metaphor of what an angry God might have in store for sinners.
