A Study Guide for Robert Lowell's "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Robert Lowell's "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535839105

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The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket

Robert Lowell

1946

Introduction

The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, one of Robert Lowell’s most anthologized and respected poems, was published in Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and serves as an elegy for Lowell’s maternal cousin, Warren Winslow, who was killed in an explosion aboard a naval ship during World War II. The poem is unusual because, while it mourns the lost cousin, it also assigns him responsibility for his own death. By the time Winslow died in January of 1944, Lowell had already served approximately six months in jail for refusing to fight in World War II, having converted before that to Catholicism in 1941. Considering this history, Lowell appears to have used the occasion of his cousin’s death to compile a poem of not only political and religious importance, but of immense referential scope—a poem assembling snippets of Melville, Thoreau, Milton, The Bible, and still other sources. The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket uses the occasion of a relative’s untimely death to cobble together a poem asserting that humanity’s decimation of nature and humankind’s self-destruction in war are affronts to a ever-present Judeo-Christian God, who may forgive, but cannot forget.

Author Biography

Robert Lowell—the so-called father of confessional poetry, which was inaugurated in his 1959 poem Skunk Hour—was born March 1, 1917, an only child in a wealthy and distinguished family. His father was a naval officer; his great-great-uncle was James Russell Lowell, a poet, educator, and editor; and his cousin was Amy Lowell, the poet whose name Ezra Pound used to sarcastically dub a degenerating Imagism (Amygism). Lowell attended Harvard University for two years. During his summer vacation in 1937, he and novelist Ford Madox Ford stayed at the home of poet Allen Tate. The following fall, Lowell transferred to Kenyon College to study with poet and critic John Crowe Ransom. At Kenyon, Lowell met poet Randall Jarrell and short–story writer Peter Taylor. Lowell graduated summa cum laude in Classics and, in 1940, married novelist Jean Stafford. Lowell then pursued graduate studies at Louisiana State University under critics Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. In 1941, Lowell officially converted to Catholicism and married Stafford once again, in a Roman Catholic ceremony. Before finishing graduate school, Lowell and Stafford moved to New