From “Cooked” to “Raw”: Rhyme in Robert Lowell’s Poetry Barbora Millerová College

Robert Lowell’s writing style changed a great deed throughout his life. Some critics have discussed the reasons and impacts of these changes.[1]In Robert Lowell’s poems, there is a contrast between the strict rhyme scheme of his earlier poems and the later ones, which are written in loose forms and free verse. In his early poems in the 1940s, he mostly wrote in traditional forms using strict rules of rhyme scheme. However, later from the 1950s he started using looser forms and metres and experiment with different kinds of rhyming. In his later poetry, the rhyme is very irregular and although it does contain end rhymes sometimes, since they have no particular structure it is still considered to be free verse. As Randall Jarrell pointed out in his essay, “anyone who compares Mr. Lowell’s earlier and later poems will see this movement from constriction to liberation at his work’s ruling principle of growth”.[2]This shift is particularly visible while looking at the early traditional poetry that only includes end rhymes.

The example of a very traditional poetry in both form and rhyme pattern can be seen in Lowell’s collection Lord Weary’s Castle(1946). It is written mostly in couplets in the scheme of AABBCCDD, which is...