Lowell School's Namesake

During the early 1900’s, a resurgent interest in the arts spread across the country.  This was embraced by Missoulians.  Residents of Missoula’s westside area were working to build a new school, start a neighborhood park, and to encourage the development of the arts through architecture, writing and music. Philosophers and poets were studied, read, discussed and highly esteemed.   Westside street names were selected accordingly, as well as the naming of Whittier School after the poet John Greenleaf Whittier.  Lowell School, designed by the great architect A.J. Gibson, was named after a poet also, James Russell Lowell.

James Russell Lowell

–John Tyree Fain and Marcy Schrader-Lauinger

James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), is remembered today as an outstanding American poet.  In his own time he was known equally well as a literary critic, lecturer, teacher, scholar, reformer, and diplomat.  His poetry shows forceful expression, wit, common sense, and contains many beautiful phrases and lines. 
 
Lowell was born on Feb. 22, 1819, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  His family was a distinguished one, and his early life was happy.  He was the youngest of five children.  He was named after his great grandfather, who was a minister in Newburyport.  His grandfather, John Lowell, had been a member of the Second Continental Congress.  He introduced into the Bill of Rights the phrase, "All men are created free and equal," with the purpose of setting every slave free in the state of Massachusetts. His father, Charles Lowell, was a minister of the West Church in Boston.  His cousins, Amy, Percival, and Abbott, became famous in the fields of poetry. Astronomy, and education.

Lowell inherited wit and a love of poetry from his mother.  He gained much of his education through wide reading and constant contact with nature and educated people, rather than by regular attendance at school.   It was a family tradition to attend Harvard University.  But when he went to Harvard, Lowell neglected all his work except literature and languages, and almost failed to get a degree.  He completed his undergraduate work at Harvard University in 1838 and was designated the “class poet”.

In 1840, Lowell graduated from Harvard Law School, but he was never much interested in the practice of law.  While waiting for legal business, he wrote poetry and became a Unitarian minister.  His first volume of poems, A Year’s Life, was published in 1841.  He dedicated it to Maria White, the young poet and reformer to whom he was engaged.  Her influence on Lowell was great, especially after their marriage in 1844.  She led him to take a stand against slavery and to support other reform movements.

In 1843, Lowell and a friend, Robert Carter, founded The Pioneer, a magazine for which Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Greenleaf Whittier, and others wrote, including himself.  In spite of its quality, The Pioneer failed financially.  In 1843 and 1848, two more volumes of poems by Lowell appeared.  During the late 1840’s, Lowell contributed to several abolitionist publications, including the National Anti-Slavery Standard, which he helped edit, and the Pennsylvania Freeman.

During the Mexican War, Lowell began his Bigelow Papers.  The first of these political satires in verse appeared in the Boston Courier in 1846.  It was written in Yankee dialect, supposedly by one of the paper’s subscribers, Hosea Bigelow.  Soon the real author became known.  Lowell’s fame spread as the series became widely popular through the sly humor, irony, and political philosophy of its New England characters.  In 1848 , Lowell produced his best-known poem,

“The Vision of Sir Launfal.”

The Fable for Critics, another long poem, appeared in 1848.  It proved Lowell to be one of the foremost critics of the day.  The poem was characterized by puns and sharp ridicule.  His later work as a literary critic took the form of essays, as did his political writing.  Lowell became known as a leading poet.  In 1851, he visited Europe with his family.  However, his happy, successful life was about to change. 

By 1853, tragedy struck as his wife and three of his four children died. For several years Lowell’s grief over the deaths in his family stopped his ability to write.  Lowell went again to Europe in 1855 to study and grieve. To earn an income, he took up editing and teaching jobs. The trips to Europe helped fit him to follow Longfellow as professor of modern languages at Harvard.  He took this post in 1855.  As an instructor, he was especially successful in making his students think and in awakening them to an appreciation of the beauties of literature.  In 1857, he was married to Frances Dunlap, with whom he lived happily for more than 25 years. 

During Lowell’s early career as a professor, he took on for two years the added duties of editing the newly founded magazine, Atlantic Monthly.  From 1863 to 1872, he was one of the editors of the North American Review.  Much of his best prose appeared in these magazines. 

Lowell wrote a second series of Biglow Papers, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly.  It was collected for publication in book form in 1867.  The first series had been inspired by the Mexican War.  When the Civil War began, Lowell again let Hosea Biglow express his opinions on political questions. 

At the close of the war, Lowell wrote his Commemoration Ode in honor of Abraham Lincoln and Harvard graduates who had died in battle.  He himself had lost eight relatives in the war, and his heart was in the poem.

In 1872, Lowell again visited Europe for study and observation.  English literary leaders welcomed him, and Oxford and Cambridge universities conferred honorary degrees on him.  At home and abroad, he was considered a representative of the best American culture.  President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed him United States Minister to Spain in 1877.  Lowell had been a presidential elector the year before, and had supported the Republican Party in his writings.

After three years in Spain, Lowell was transferred to England.  His diplomatic duties required little of him except to build up good will for the United States.  But his uprightness, learning, humor, and brilliant oratory made him a prominent man in England.  In 1885, his second wife died, and in the same year he was called back to America. 

In Cambridge once more, Lowell was still a public figure.  His mind remained vigorous, and no great occasion was properly celebrated without a word from him.  He made the principal address on the two hundred and fifteenth anniversary of the founding of Harvard University.  He collected a volume of his verse, and in 1886 he published some of the speeches he had made in England, using one called Democracy for the volume title. 

His other works include the books of verse, Under the Willows (1868), and Memorial Poems (1876); and his prose works Fireside Travels (1864), My Study Windows (1874), Among My Books (1876), Democracy (1886), and Political Essays (1888).

On Aug. 12, 1891, at the age of 72, Lowell died at Elmwood, the colonial house and family home in Cambridge, where he was born and lived most of his life. Elmwood.

"And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots
And the Cabots talk only to God."
  ---John Collins Bossidy, Toast, Holy Cross Alumni Dinner, 1910. 

Lowell 3 cent stamp.

Lowell Crossword Activity

Poetry of James Russell Lowell   

Quotes from James Russell Lowell      

Lowell School Poet in Residence                                 

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