The Mills of The Kavanaughs
First edition
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| Author | Robert Lowell |
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| Language | English |
| Publisher | Harcourt Brace |
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Publication date
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1951 |
| Preceded by | Lord Weary's Castle |
| Followed by | Life Studies |
The Mills of the Kavanaughs is the third book of poems written by the American poet Robert Lowell. Like Lowell's previous book, Lord Weary's Castle, the poetry in Kavanaughs was also ornate, formal, dense, and metered. All of the poems are dramatic monologues, and the literary scholar Helen Vendler noted that the poems in this volume "were clearly influenced by Frost's narrative poems as well as by Browning."
The majority of the book consists of the epic title poem which tells the story of Anne Kavanaugh, a widow living in Maine in 1943, who "is sitting in her garden playing solitaire" and Lowell tells her story through a series of stream-of-consciousness flashbacks in which she recalls her troubled relationship with her now-deceased husband, Harry.
The editors of Lowell's Collected Poems, Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, include a large footnote on the poem with an excerpt from Hugh Staples' book Robert Lowell: The First Twenty Years (1962) in which Staples provides the following summary of the poem's plot in flashback:
Anne [grew up as] a poor girl from a family of thirteen children, who [was] first adopted by the Kavanaughs and then [got] married to the youngest son, Harry. . .Joining the Navy prior to Pearl Harbor, her husband returns from the war on the verge of a nervous breakdown; he attempts and fails to suffocate his wife in bed one night because she speaks aloud, while asleep, to a man in a dream; Harry fears that she has committed adultery. Shortly thereafter, greatly distraught, he [dies].
Staples notes that "Ovid's mythological account of Persephone in Metamorphoses V . . .is brought into play [throughout the poem].
The poem was published in two additional versions that were quite different from the version in The Mills of the Kavanaughs. First, there was a magazine version of the poem that appeared in the Kenyon Review in 1951 prior to the publication of The Mills of the Kavanaughs. The editors of Lowell's Collected Poems note that the magazine version included references to the Virgin Mary and Saint Patrick that Lowell later removed. Then, many years after the publication of the poem in The Mills of the Kavanaughs, the poem re-appeared in a new version when Lowell released his Selected Poems in 1976. In this volume, he included a significantly shorter version of the poem in which he pared the epic 38 stanza poem down to just five stanzas.
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