Lowell Wins a Pulitzer Prize For Verse Book 'The Dolphin'

Robert T. S. Lowell '39, Emerson Lecturer on English Literature, Monday won the 1974 Putlitzer Prize for Poetry for his book of verse "The Dolphin."

The honor makes Lowell the only poet besides Robert Frost to garner the Pulitzer Prize twice. He first won the prize in 1947 for "Lord Weary's Castle."

"The Dolphin" was published simultaneously with "History" and "For Lizzie and Harriet" in 1973.

"Lowell is one of the most completely masterful and distinguished poets of the English Language," Anthony Hecht, also a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, said yesterday. "I should think he richly deserves the prize."

The honor is the second major prize that Lowell has captured in the last month. On April 10 he became the first recipient of the $10,000 Copernicus Award for Poetry, awarded in recognition of an "outstanding lifetime achievement."

Lowell's prize-winning book is a continuation of his experimentation with the sonnet begun in "Notebook 1967-68." "Lowell invented the unrhymed 14-line form about seven years ago, and since then has made thousands of revisions," Elizabeth Bishop, lecturer on English and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, said yesterday. "His new verse is full of marvelous imagery as it always has been, but I like 'History' best of the three recent books."

Hecht said yesterday that Lowell had made a major progression in theme since "Lord Weary's Castle," but praised him for maintaining a sense of continuity in his verse. "'Lord Weary's Castle' was clearly a religious book of verse, whereas his current books are not," Hecht said yesterday. "But his verse has a sense of continuity. It is an inquisition into himself, a painful and self-defeating questioning of the self which seems to echo the life of society in general."

Lowell could not be reached for comment yesterday.

The $1000 prize is given by trustees of Columbia University upon the recommendation of an advisory board of unnamed jurors