John Livingston Lowes
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John Livingston Lowes (December 20, 1867-August 15, 1945) was an American scholar of English literature. He was born in Decatur, Indiana. He was an authority on the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Lowes was known for his style of research in which he studied the sources and readings of Coleridge in order to understand his inspirations and his frame of mind during writings.
Lowes graduated from Washington and Jefferson College, in Washington, PA, in 1888 with an AB degree and took postgraduate courses in Germany and at Harvard University. He taught mathematics at Washington and Jefferson College until 1891 when he received his MA degree. He served on the faculties of several colleges. During his career, he was an English professor, and later Dean of Arts & Sciences, at Washington University in St. Louis from 1909 to 1918 and at Harvard from 1918 to 1939. He was Lowell Institute lecturer in 1919 and was the author of Convention and Revolt in Poetry (1919).
Lowes's most famous work is The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Houghton Mifflin, 1927), which examines Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan among others. This book was influential for many of his generation in understanding the nature of the creative and imaginative process. He used a notebook that belonged to Coleridge as well as records from the Bristol Library to put together a list of books that Coleridge read during the time of his writings. Lowes was able to associate elements of Coleridge's poems directly to things he was reading at the time. The book is a classic, though later critics have disputed the style and the findings.
Lowes died in Boston, Massachusetts.
