The generation of poets to which Robert Lowell belongs was dominated by the literary theory and practice of T. S. Eliot. Lowell's birth in the same year (1917) in which Eliot's first major collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published, is the first of many coincidences in the poets' lives. Like Eliot thirty years before, Lowell was born into a highly distinguished New England family conspicuous in public service and cultural pursuits. It was said of Boston, in those days, that
The Lowells talk only to Cabots
And the Cabots talk only to God.
And if Lowell's father was rather less than the noblest of his kind, this made his parents more anxious to aspire to familic expectations. The poet who was to write bitter verse on the subject as a man, was depressed in childhood by the ostentatious emblems of patriarchy at home, the watered-down Unitarian religion of puritan moralism at church, and his parents' yearning for success in the world at large.
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