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Robert Lowell struggled all his life to elude his rarefied Boston heritage

17 December 2022

9:00 AM

17 December 2022

9:00 AM

Memoirs Robert Lowell, edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc

Faber, pp.387, 40

The American poet Robert Lowell (1917-77) was a so-called ‘Boston Brahmin’, a Lowell of Boston, where, in the widely known distich, ‘the Lowells speak only to Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God’. (In 1923, when one Harry H. Kabotchnik, against furious protests from the Cabots, succeeded in getting his name changed, this briefly became ‘and the Cabots speak Yiddish, by God’.

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