The Lowell Trail

Boston born (1917) and ancestrally steeped in these perimeters, Robert Lowell impressed himself on several generations of American poets—as literary exemplar, writer-engagé, and teacher—at Harvard, but also, notably, at Boston University, where, in Room 222, two floors above the AGNI offices, he taught some of his legendary classes. These include, most famously, the one attended—at the same time—by George Starbuck, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath. Robert Gardner’s photographs of Lowell, taken in 1959, the year of the publication of his celebrated Life Studies, catch the poet at this very point in his teaching career. The remembrances and reflections that follow, by friends, former students, and poets who took some decisive inspiration, map a trail of influence that remains, in old-style police lingo, “hot.”