John Livingston Lowes (December 20, 1867 – August 15, 1945) was an American scholar and critic of English literature, specializing in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Geoffrey Chaucer.
Life.
John Livingston Lowes was born in Decatur, Indiana on December 20, 1867. He earned a B.A. from Washington and Jefferson College in 1888 and did postgraduate work in Germany and at Harvard University. He taught mathematics at Washington and Jefferson College until 1891 when he received his M.A.
From 1909 to 1918 he worked as an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also served as dean of arts and sciences. From 1918 to 1939 he taught English at Harvard. In 1919 he was the Lowell Institute lecturer and the author of "Convention and Revolt in Poetry". His grandfather was David Elliott, who had served as President of Washington College.
Lowes was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1921 and the American Philosophical Society in 1934.
He was the first Eastman Professor at the University of Oxford in 1930-31, attached to Balliol College.
Lowes died in Boston, Massachusetts on August 15, 1945, aged 77.
Works.
Coleridge.
Lowes' most famous work is "The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination" (Houghton Mifflin, 1927), which examines the sources of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan." Using Coleridge's notebook and other papers at the Bristol Library, Lowes put together a list of books that the poet read before and during the time he composed his poems. The trick was to connect images and ideas in the poems to images and ideas in Coleridge's reading. Though later critics have disputed both Lowes' findings and method, "The Road to Xanadu", according to English author Toby Litt, is "a book of a lifetime": "Its argument, that Coleridge had one of the most extraordinary minds the world has ever seen, is there on every page"; it "is one of the books which helped me understand what writing is."
Chaucer.
Lowes' book on Chaucer (1934), building on the work of George Lyman Kittredge, treats the poet not just as the "father of English poetry" but as, along with Shakespeare and Milton, English literature's greatest poet. The book greatly influenced E. Talbot Donaldson and other eminent mid-20th-century Chaucerians.