Lord Weary's Castle
First edition
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| Author | Robert Lowell |
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| Language | English |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Publisher | Harcourt Brace |
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Publication date
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1946 |
| Preceded by | Land of Unlikeness |
| Followed by | The Mills of The Kavanaughs |
Lord Weary's Castle, Robert Lowell's second book of poetry, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947 when Lowell was only thirty. Robert Giroux, who was the publisher of Lowell's wife at the time, Jean Stafford, also became Lowell's publisher after he saw the manuscript for Lord Weary's Castle and was very impressed; he later stated that Lord Weary's Castle was the most successful book of poems that he ever published.
In a note before the first poem of the book, Lowell states that the title of the book was derived from "an old ballad." More specifically, in Frank Bidart's notes to Lowell's Collected Poems, Bidart writes that the title comes from "the anonymous Scottish ballad 'Lamkin.'" Bidart goes on to explain that in the ballad's narrative, "Lord Weary refuses to pay the stonemason Lamkin for building his castle; in revenge for this betrayal, Lambkin kills Weary's wife and child." Bidart does not offer any explanation as to how the story of Lamkin and Lord Weary's castle relates to the content of Lowell's book.
However, in a review of the book that appeared in Poetry magazine, the critic Austin Warren offered the explanation that the book's title implied that "disaster is befalling the house, and the household, of aristocratic (Calvinist, capitalist) New England, which has failed to pay its moral bills to the 'lower order,' its instruments."
Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics at the beginning of his career, Lowell wrote rigorously formal and dense poetry that won him praise for his exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lord Weary's Castle epitomized this early style which was also notable for its frequently violent imagery. For instance, in "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket," the best-known poem from the book, Lowell wrote the following:
The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,
the fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,
the death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears
the gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,
and hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags
and rips the sperm-whale's midriff into rags,
...
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