Part of what makes Lowell’s poetry so significant in the American canon is his identity as the descendant of an old Bostonian family, with historically significant ancestors on both sides of his family, and his uneasy connection to that past. Nicholas Jenkins, a professor at Stanford who writes about Lowell’s “biographical datum,” argues that situating his poetry in context with his family history “can be a crucial stimulus to interpretation.” One important facet of Lowell’s lineage, he argues, is a number of significant Jewish ancestors on both sides of Lowell’s family. He argues that this information “offers a counterframe to the conventional WASP New England world into which Lowell is normally fitted,” and henceforth had an effect on his writing. Jenkins here implies that this context “[changes] the object in that context,” the object being Lowell.
Jenkins argues that Lowell writes with “the sense of himself as a kind of fallen aristocrat.” "Skunk Hour" hints at this theme; the speaker immediately fleshes out the wealth and social status of the three characters in their first stanza. The speaker, however, writes as if from a distance, alone in his car or out on his back steps. Those locations do not clarify his wealth or social status. Yet the indisputable fact remains that Lowell’s ancestors are famous and can be traced as far back as the 1100s. He was a direct descendant of Henry II, the first Plantagenet king of England. In poems such as For the Union Dead, it is informative to consider how Lowell felt placed into a significant lineage; this feeling allowed him an un-sturdy sense of grandeur that seeped into his writing.
Lowell, according to Stuart Schoffman, a writer for the Jewish Review of Books, had a complicated relationship with Judaism. Schoffman summarizes the biographical detail in Sandra Hochman's Loving Robert Lowell and Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character by Kay Redfield Jamison. At least in his youth, Lowell was fascinated with Ezra Pound, a well-known anti-Semite; however, his letters to Pound revealed his distaste for Pound’s views on the Jewish people. However, Hochman gives an account of an episode in which Lowell, with whom she had an affair, became violent towards her, saying, “I’m Hitler and you’re a Jew, and I’m going to kill you.” This account is credible, if unverifiable; Lowell was physically abusive to his first wife, Jean Stafford, and had many manic episodes throughout his life. As Schoffman puts it, Lowell "was drawn to tyrants."
In 1964 Life magazine ran a feature on Lowell, where he referenced his Jewish ancestry and said, "...we’re lucky to have the Jewish influence. It’s what keeps New York alive; not only writers and painters but also the good bourgeois who support the arts." His comments can seem slightly misguided to the modern reader, but it supports the point Schoffman makes, that Lowell seemed to identify with the Jewish portion of his ethnicity. Schoffman also argues that Lowell felt guilt for his ancestors' well-known participation in the American colonization; for example, he wrote a poem about King Philip's War, in which colonists killed thousands of Native Americans and ended their existence as a national entity. To Lowell, Schoffman argues, his Jewish ancestors represented a sort of clean slate. In his prose piece "91 Revere Street," Lowell writes of his Jewish ancestor, "Great-great-Grandfather Myers had never frowned down in judgment on a Salem witch. There was no allegory in his eyes, no Mayflower." It seems that Lowell wanted to disengage himself from the most destructive legacies of his lineage. However, identifying more strongly with his Jewish relatives could not have brought him relief from his inherited guilt, if that is what he sought.
