Robert Lowell is often considered one of the most influential American poets of the mid-20th century. Lowell’s early work was marked by tightly structured poems, using traditional meter and rhyme. “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” comes from Lowell’s early career; it was published in Lord’s Weary Castle (1946) and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. Lowell later shifted to a looser form of poetry and incorporated more personal subjects in his work. Life Studies was published in 1959 and influenced a generation of poets to write autobiographically; this genre of poetry came to be known as “confessional” poetry. Lowell wrote about many personal subjects from his parents and his marriages, to his children and his very difficult struggle with bipolar disorder. Yet throughout his life he continued to return to his Puritan ancestor Jonathan Edwards, the subject of “Mr. Edwards and the Spider,” writing about him in three other poems: “Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts,” “The Worst Sinner,” and “After the Surprising Conversions.”

Lowell wanted to write a biography about Jonathan Edwards, an influential preacher of the early 18th century, but later abandoned the idea; Lowell felt compelled to reckon with his Puritan past through poetry. Lowell, who was related to Edwards on his mother’s side, incorporated the prose writings from Edwards in his poem, allowing a complex portrait that goes beyond the “fire and brimstone persona” that many associate with Edwards. Lowell’s portrait of the 18th century Edwards has a poignancy that speaks to audiences to this day.

Poet Biography

Robert Lowell was born on March 1, 1917 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the son of Robert Traill Spence Lowell III and Charlotte Winslow. The Lowell and Winslow families were prominent New England families who could trace their lineage to the Mayflower. Other family members who were significant literary figures include James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), one of the New England Fireside poets, Amy Lowell (1874-1925), one of the Modernist Imagist poets, and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), a Puritan preacher during the Great Awakening of the mid-1700s and the speaker in “Mr. Edwards and the Spider.”

Lowell grew up with many privileges due to his “Boston Brahmin” family, but there were significant tensions between him and his parents, who expected him to conform to a certain upper-class lifestyle. Lowell rebelled against these constraints; he ended up leaving Harvard after two years to study with Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, who taught at Kenyon College. Lowell was influenced by the New Criticism of Tate, Ransom, and other writers of the time. He graduated in 1940.

Lowell taught at several universities, including Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Some of his students include the poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton as well as literary scholars, such as Helen Vendler. Lowell’s early work was influenced by New Criticism, a formalist theory that emphasized careful reading of text with an emphasis on structure to determine meaning. His first book of poetry, Land of Unlikeness, was published in 1944. His second book of poetry, Lord’s Weary Castle was published in 1946 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. He served as U.S. Poet Laureate (known then as “Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress”) from 1947-1948. The Mills of the Kavanaughs, his third book of poetry, was published in 1951.

His style gradually shifted from formal metrical verse to a more autobiographical style. In 1959, his groundbreaking book of poetry, Life Studies was published. It won the National Book Award for poetry and was a powerful influence in what became labeled as the “Confessional” style of writing. He became one of the most well-known poets in America at the time and was featured on the cover of Time magazine in June 1967. He also wrote For the Union Dead (1964), Near the Ocean (1967), Notebook (1969), History (1973), For Lizzie and Harriet (1973), The Dolphin (1973), and Day by Day (1975), as well as many translations and a play, The Old Glory (1965).

He married the writer Jean Stafford in 1940; that relationship ended in 1948. He married the writer Elizabeth Hardwick in 1949. They stayed married for 20 years and had one child, Harriet. They then divorced and Lowell married the writer Caroline Blackwood, whom he met in 1970, married in 1972, and had one child with, named Sherwood. Lowell also had three stepdaughters from Caroline’s previous marriage. These domestic relationships were severely tested by Lowell’s mental health as he suffered from debilitating manic depression, which he tried to manage through psychoanalysis, electroshock therapy, and drugs. Lowell died of a heart attack in 1977 at the age of 60.

Poem Text

Lowell, Robert. “Mr. Edwards and the Spider.” 1946.The Kenyon Review.

Summary

In the first stanza of this five-stanza poem, the speaker (a young Jonathan Edwards) observes spiders as they move among the trees on a warm summer day. The spiders seem to be the only ones at work on this farm. The stanza shifts midway when the speaker anticipates the deaths of the spiders with the arrival of the fall “westerly” winds, which will blow the spiders to the sea where they will drown (Line 5).

In the next stanza, the poem abruptly shifts from the pastoral setting. Edwards is now older, a Puritan preacher, exhorting his listener to avoid the fires of hell. The speaker addresses a sinner (“you”) who is attempting to evade the fires of damnation by building a defense made of “thorn and briar” (Line 11). The speaker points out the futility of this action since fire will destroy the “wild thorns” (Line 14). At the end of the stanza, the speaker raises the question, “How will the heart endure?” (Line 18). The power of God looms large, threatening the efforts of the You to survive.

In the third stanza, the poem returns to the spider imagery, but these spiders are no longer the beautiful harmless spiders from stanza one. The speaker reflects on the ability of tiny creatures such as the poisonous spiders to “kill a tiger” (Line 21). This poisonous power shows that the so-called “authority” of larger creatures is questionable. The poem then moves to the power of God, reframing the discussion so that the larger creatures, including man, are suddenly dwarfed by God and his absolute power. “It’s well / If God who holds you to the pit of hell, / Much as one holds a spider, will destroy/ Baffle and dissipate your soul” (Lines 24-27). Man is nothing in the face of God’s anger and strength.

The fourth stanza (and the very end of the third stanza) return to Edwards (“I”) as a boy witnessing the death of a spider as it is thrown into a fire. The boy realizes that death is swift. The spider must give in to the burning; survival is impossible. Edwards then states that “This is the sinner’s last retreat” (Line 33) as the sinner also hopes for a quick death, similar to the spider’s quick incineration.

But the final fifth stanza overturns that thinking as the adult Edwards reflects, “But who can plumb the sinking of that soul?” (Line 37). Edwards shows that the hope for a quick death is futile. He directly addresses Josiah Hawley as an example, suggesting that the fires of hell could burn Hawley forever: “the blaze/ Is infinite, eternal (Lines 43-44). Death is not a moment’s easing and exiting from the pain of life but the entering into an everlasting pain of death.