No weekends for the gods now. Wars flicker, earth licks its open sores, fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance assassinations, no advance. Only man thinning out his own kind sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind swipe of the pruner and his knife busy about the tree of life... Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone; peace to our children when they fall in small war on the heels of small war - until the end of time to police th eearth, a ghost orbiting forever lost in our monotonous sublime.

In a letter to Jarrell from 1957 Lowell wrote "I suppose we shouldn't swap too many compliments but I am heavily in your debt. Later the press would characterize their marriage as "restless and emotionally harrowing. Life


Family history
Lowell was born to Commander Robert Traill Spencer Lowell III and Charlotte (née Winslow) in Boston Massachusetts.

He won the Pulitzer Prize in both 1947 and 1974 the National Book Award in 1960 and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977. Robert "Cal" Traill Spence Lowell IV (March 1 1917 – September 12 1977) was an American poet considered to be one of the founders of the confessional poetry movement.