James Russell Lowell

James Russell Lowell is a long essay or short critical study by Henry James, originally written for an American magazine after Lowell’s death in 1891 and later collected in Essays in London and Elsewhere. Lowell was the elder Cambridge poet and critic who had been editor of the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review, and who had served as American minister in Madrid and London. James had known him personally.

The essay is partly a memorial and partly a serious assessment of Lowell as a poet, a critic, and a representative American man of letters. James handles the poetry carefully. He is not a great admirer of the comic Biglow Papers and is willing to say so, but he respects the formal verse and the criticism. The criticism in particular he thinks underrated, especially the essays on Shakespeare and Dryden, which he believes will outlast much else Lowell wrote.

The more interesting part of the essay is the portrait of Lowell as a kind of American figure. James saw him as one of the last of the New England men of letters who could carry a national authority simply by writing well, and he uses the essay to think about whether that role was still possible. By the 1890s the literary scene had broken up into specialties, and a general critic of Lowell’s old style no longer had the same standing. James is gentle about this but he is clearly thinking about his own situation too.

The piece is short, perhaps an hour’s reading. It works best for readers already interested in nineteenth century American letters, or in how James talked about other writers. It pairs naturally with his short book on Hawthorne, written about a different earlier Cambridge figure, and with his essays on Emerson and on Henry Adams. As a group those essays make up a small portrait of the Boston Cambridge world James grew up around and largely walked away from.