Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST ¿*In this magisterial study of the relationship between illness and art, the best-selling author of An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison,*brings an entirely fresh understanding to the work and*life of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), whose intense, complex, and personal verse left a lasting mark on the English language and changed the public discourse about private matters.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry, Robert Lowell put his manic-depressive illness (now known as bipolar disorder)*into the public domain, creating a language for madness that was new and arresting. As Dr. Jamison brings her expertise in mood disorders to bear on Lowell's story, she illuminates not only the relationships among mania, depression, and creativity but also the details of Lowell's treatment and how illness and treatment influenced the great work that he produced (and often became its subject). Lowell's New England roots, early breakdowns, marriages to three eminent writers, friendships with other poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, his many hospitalizations, his vivid presence as both a teacher and a maker of poems-Jamison gives us the poet's life through a lens that focuses our understanding of his intense discipline, courage, and commitment to his art. Jamison had unprecedented access to Lowell's medical records, as well as to previously unpublished drafts and fragments of poems, and she is the first biographer to have spoken with his daughter, Harriet Lowell. With this new material and a psychologist's deep insight, Jamison delivers a bold, sympathetic account of a poet who was-both despite and because of mental illness-a passionate, original observer of the human condition.
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Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST ¿*In this magisterial study of the relationship between illness and art, the best-selling author of An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison,*brings an entirely fresh understanding to the work and*life of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), whose intense, complex, and personal verse left a lasting mark on the English language and changed the public discourse about private matters.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry, Robert Lowell put his manic-depressive illness (now known as bipolar disorder)*into the public domain, creating a language for madness that was new and arresting. As Dr. Jamison brings her expertise in mood disorders to bear on Lowell's story, she illuminates not only the relationships among mania, depression, and creativity but also the details of Lowell's treatment and how illness and treatment influenced the great work that he produced (and often became its subject). Lowell's New England roots, early breakdowns, marriages to three eminent writers, friendships with other poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, his many hospitalizations, his vivid presence as both a teacher and a maker of poems-Jamison gives us the poet's life through a lens that focuses our understanding of his intense discipline, courage, and commitment to his art. Jamison had unprecedented access to Lowell's medical records, as well as to previously unpublished drafts and fragments of poems, and she is the first biographer to have spoken with his daughter, Harriet Lowell. With this new material and a psychologist's deep insight, Jamison delivers a bold, sympathetic account of a poet who was-both despite and because of mental illness-a passionate, original observer of the human condition.
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Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character

by Kay Redfield Jamison

Narrated by Jefferson Mays

Unabridged — 17 hours, 59 minutes

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character

by Kay Redfield Jamison

Narrated by Jefferson Mays

Unabridged — 17 hours, 59 minutes

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Overview

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST ¿*In this magisterial study of the relationship between illness and art, the best-selling author of An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison,*brings an entirely fresh understanding to the work and*life of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), whose intense, complex, and personal verse left a lasting mark on the English language and changed the public discourse about private matters.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry, Robert Lowell put his manic-depressive illness (now known as bipolar disorder)*into the public domain, creating a language for madness that was new and arresting. As Dr. Jamison brings her expertise in mood disorders to bear on Lowell's story, she illuminates not only the relationships among mania, depression, and creativity but also the details of Lowell's treatment and how illness and treatment influenced the great work that he produced (and often became its subject). Lowell's New England roots, early breakdowns, marriages to three eminent writers, friendships with other poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, his many hospitalizations, his vivid presence as both a teacher and a maker of poems-Jamison gives us the poet's life through a lens that focuses our understanding of his intense discipline, courage, and commitment to his art. Jamison had unprecedented access to Lowell's medical records, as well as to previously unpublished drafts and fragments of poems, and she is the first biographer to have spoken with his daughter, Harriet Lowell. With this new material and a psychologist's deep insight, Jamison delivers a bold, sympathetic account of a poet who was-both despite and because of mental illness-a passionate, original observer of the human condition.

Editorial Reviews

MARCH 2017 - AudioFile

The subtitle of this audiobook summarizes it well: “A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character.” While it does cover the major events of the renowned American poet's life, it’s not a biography in the conventional sense. Instead, it’s a consideration of the relationship between his genius and his bipolar illness—by a psychologist who herself has bipolar illness. Narrator Jefferson Mays does a solid job with the text, which includes a great deal of prose and poetry from Lowell himself, as as well as from his friends, many of whom were also respected poets. The technical aspects of the psychological discussion remain clear as well. Lowell's prose overshadows Jamison's, but Mays gives the work of both writers appropriate weight, and he is particularly good with the poetry. For an extra treat, the book ends with Lowell reading one of his own poems, "Epilogue." D.M.H. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

The Barnes & Noble Review

In a 1959 letter to his fellow poet John Berryman, Robert Lowell wrote,

I have been thinking much about you all summer, and how we have gone through the same troubles, visiting the bottom of the world. I have wanted to stretch out a hand, and tell you that I have been there too, and how it all lightens and life swims back . . . The night is now passed, and I feel certain that your fire and loyalty, and all-outedness carry you buoyantly on. The dark moment comes, it goes.
Berryman had telephoned him the night before; he had just separated from his second wife. Lowell had indeed been there too, he really had "gone through the same troubles"; had, like Berryman, conducted an unstable and at times tumultuous personal life, had struggled with alcohol, had suffered from devastating mental illness. "The bottom of the world" was a place both men knew well. Neither would ever fully break free of the cycle of suffering. Berryman would commit suicide in 1972, while Lowell would continue to suffer periodic breakdowns and frequent hospitalizations until his death from heart failure in 1977. The dark moment comes, and then it goes; but for both men it always came again, later if not sooner.

Other poets of the American midcentury also suffered from depression. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton committed suicide; Randall Jarrell is widely believed to have done so as well. Theodore Roethke and Delmore Schwartz, too, drank heavily and suffered from periodic bouts of mental illness. All of them, despite the challenges they faced, managed to achieve works of deep beauty and lasting significance. Lowell, for his part, was regarded while he lived as the leading American poet of his generation; his reputation has receded a bit since then, but he remains fairly firmly established. Reading the account of his life, and in particular the detailed account of his illness, Kay Redfield Jamison offers in Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire, one feels astonished that someone so severely afflicted could have managed to continue to write at all, let alone that he could have written the poems — poems that combine audacity and tenderness in roughly equal measure — on which that reputation is based.

Part of Lowell's misfortune was to suffer in an era in which understanding of manic-depressive illness — Jamison prefers this term to the more current "bipolar disorder" — was limited at best. Lithium, the treatment that worked best for Lowell, came late onto the scene; by the time he began taking it in 1968 he had been sick for decades. ("It's terrible," he told Robert Giroux, "to think that all I've suffered, and all the suffering I've caused, might have arisen from the lack of a little salt in my brain." Even then, while the lithium treatments improved his life considerably, they did not permanently relieve the manic cycle or prevent him from being hospitalized on occasion; the proper dosage and application of the new drug still needed to be worked out. Electroconvulsive therapy was tried early on; its ameliorations were at best temporary. As for psychoanalysis, Lowell found it interesting at times but mostly ineffective: while his emotional life was undeniably complex, the root of his problem was chemical. A late poem, "Notice," expresses the poignant skepticism and frustration of an afflicted man whom medicine has repeatedly failed to save:
The resident doctor said,
"We are not deep in ideas, imagination, or enthusiasm —
how can we help you?"
I asked,
"These days of only poems and depression —
what can I do with them?
Will they help me to notice
what I cannot bear to look at?"
In manic-depressive illness, episodes of acute mania are followed by plunges into depression. In between are reprieves, periods of normalcy and calm. Those who knew Lowell talked about him as if he were two different people: one a tender, charming, brilliant, and entertaining man — Derek Walcott once referred to the "gentle, amused, benign beauty of [Lowell] when he was calm" — the other a chaotic, terrifying, and frequently delusional dynamo spinning wildly out of control. Jamison, though her focus lies largely on his illness, is keenly aware that Lowell was more often than not sane and lovable; she does not let the reader mistake the madness for the man. "He was known as a gentle and kind man when he was well," she writes. "That he was well most of the time is underappreciated; the shadow cast by his illness was long." The playwright William Alfred, a close friend of Lowell's — like all of Lowell's close friends, he called the poet Cal, a shortened form of Caligula — touchingly describes one of the several occasions on which the police had to be called to restrain and subdue the poet:
So the police arrived at Marlborough Street to take him away. Before he left, he wanted to sit for a few minutes in [his daughter's] room and watch her sleep. He did this, with me telling the cops: "He won't be long." Then we left in the police wagon. And I remember the look on Cal's face — it was as if the real Cal, the Cal I knew, were looking out at me from within the mania. It was very moving. I'd never seen him crazy.
Still, as different as the two Lowells felt to those who knew him, Jamison in no way suggests that the poet's mania was deeply separate or easily cleavable from his talent. Indeed she makes a fairly convincing case that he would not have been the writer he was, or became, if it had not been for his illness. She has argued in previous work — most notably in 1993's Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament — that a general connection exists between manic-depressive illness and artistic genius. (A professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Jamison herself suffers from manic- depressive illness and has written a highly regarded memoir about her own experience of it.) The manic state, she argues, opens artists to new possibilities and prompts them to take risks — artistic and otherwise — they would not otherwise consider taking:
Mania infects the individual who is manic with the certainty that the newly generated ideas are important and must be shared . . . The elated mood that usually accompanies mania disinhibits, makes the taking of risks and exploration more likely and creative combination of ideas more probable. To be in the grip of mania is to experience the unimaginable, try the unthinkable, do the unforgivable . . . The element of mania referred to as flight of ideas . . . is at the heart of manic thought. Flight of ideas is clinically unmistakable, characterized by a torrent of near- unstoppable speech; thoughts brachiate from topic to topic, held only by a thin thread of discernible association. Ideas fly out, and as they do, they rhyme, pun, and assemble in unexampled ways. The mind is alive, electric.
Lowell himself had once told Allen Ginsberg that "the particular hopped-up state of mind in which he found himself [during manic episodes] was precisely the state of mind in which his best ideas for poetry occurred." Still, the use of the word unforgivable in the above passage reminds us that, however productive such episodes might prove to be in the long run, the risks are not only artistic but moral and personal as well, and the effects can be highly damaging. Lowell's behavior during his manic episodes, for example, could be dangerous. He more than once assaulted his first wife, Jean Stafford, breaking her nose on one occasion, attempting to strangle her on another. His second marriage, to Elizabeth Hardwick, endured for over twenty years; it was a deeply loving marriage but also an intensely troubled one. It was common for Lowell, during his manic periods, to seek out new women to have affairs with; he often convinced himself he was in love with them and several times announced to Hardwick that he was going to leave her and begin a new life with someone else. "I didn't know what I was getting into," Hardwick said later, "but even if I had, I still would have married him. He was not crazy all the time — most of the time he was wonderful." But he eventually left Hardwick too, for the English writer Caroline Blackwood, who became his third wife and who also drank heavily and suffered from depression. (Lowell and Hardwick, it should be noted, achieved a partial reconciliation in his final months.)

Setting the River on Fire is a bit too long, in places redundant, at times a bit undisciplined. Jamison wants to cover everything, and her instinct is to include everything; the book contains, among other materials, selections from Lowell's medical records, a great deal of general information about manic- depressive illness, and substantial accounts of Lowell's ancestors and their mental issues. It is, nonetheless, a fascinating and frequently moving book, one that adds considerably to our understanding of a challenging and essential artist, and one that for the most part avoids the standard perils of writing about mental illness in the context of artistic creation. It avoids romanticizing madness, as well as the sort of objectionable reductionism that insists on seeing an artist's entire oeuvre as resulting from, or being single-mindedly concerned with, his struggles with his illness. Lowell wrote insightfully about his manic and depressive episodes, and about the periods of recovery in between, but Jamison resists the temptation to treat all of his poems as veiled commentaries on his mental condition. She remembers, and reminds the reader, that he wrote about a great many other things, too.

Troy Jollimore is Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico. His most recent books are Love's Vision and At Lake Scugog: Poems, both from Princeton University Press.

Reviewer: Troy Jollimore

The New York Times Book Review - Patricia Bosworth

…Jamison has amassed a wealth of fascinating research about Lowell, which should serve scholars for years to come: his medical history, hospital reports, vivid interviews with many of his doctors and close friends, as well as letters and notes including the revealing notebook Lowell kept in 1973. But perhaps it is Jamison's personal take on mania that is finally most valuable. She knows the disease from bittersweet experience. She's been obsessed and absorbed by it, and knows the "precarious, deranging altitude to which mania ascends…Mania can fire ambition, steel the nerve and give high wind to imagination." Or, as Lowell himself once put it, "Darkness honestly lived through is a place of wonder and life."

Publishers Weekly

11/28/2016
Jamison (An Unquiet Mind), a psychologist and honorary professor of English at St. Andrew’s University, is uniquely qualified to pursue the connections between creativity and mania—in this case, through the brilliant example of American poet Robert Lowell (1917–1977). He was born into a prominent New England family from which he inherited both deep Puritan roots and a legacy of manic depression. Jamison’s study is a “narrative” of his illness. She is not interested in biography per se, but does place Lowell’s mental health in the context of his life and show his illness’s influence on his poems. Jamison paints a sympathetic but brutally honest portrait of what manic depressive disorder can do to both sufferers and the people around them—her depiction of Lowell’s second wife, critic and fiction author Elizabeth Hardwick, is especially compelling. She is able to draw on medical records from his various hospitalizations, released by Lowell’s family to Jamison, and bring her own medical expertise to bear. Some judicious editing would not go amiss—this is a long read with some repetition—but Jamison has constructed a novel and rewarding way to view Lowell’s life and output. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Seattle Times, and The Times Literary Supplement

"Superb." —Pulitzer Prize Board

“Remarkable. . . . One reads this biography—so full of incident—as one would read a novel.” —The New York Review of Books

“Groundbreaking. . . . A case study of what a person with an extraordinary will, an unwavering sense of vocation, and a huge talent . . . could and could not do about the fact that the defining feature of his gift was also the source of his suffering.” —The New Yorker

“One of the finest biographies I have read.” —Andrew Solomon
 
“Impassioned, intellectually thrilling. . . . Empathetic and astute, as heartfelt as it is heartbreaking.” —The Washington Post

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire is a study in one genius reaching back in time to unpack the psyche of another.” —Vanity Fair
 
“Jamison has amassed a wealth of fascinating research about Lowell, which should serve scholars for years to come. . . . But perhaps it is Jamison’s personal take on mania that is finally most valuable. She knows the disease from bittersweet experience. She’s been obsessed and absorbed by it.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“A remarkably poignant, in-depth . . . look at the making of art under often hair-raising circumstances. [Jamison] doesn’t skimp on the damage Lowell caused, both to himself and others, when he was at his worst, which makes the insistent re-emergence of his best self an act worth marveling at, as courageous and full of stamina in its way as that of any war hero.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“Finally, a book commensurate to the immensity that was Robert Lowell. This is the soul that fires the poetry and prose, the soul that his friends fell in love with.” —Frank Bidart
 
“Ambitious . . . penetrating. . . . Absorbing. . . . [Jamison] approaches Lowell’s vexed life not only with scholarly authority but also with literary talent and confidence.” —The New York Review of Books

“A book for the ages: poignant, ambitious, and bighearted, about friendship, history, and the mad dance of mind that Lowell faced with supreme courage.” —Brenda Wineapple
 
“Jamison’s understanding of literature is . . . ‘fast, compound, legendary’; she draws from a vast knowledge while disclosing this larger than life poet who was loved, hated, and because of brain chemistry, often misunderstood.” —The Boston Globe
 
“A remarkable look into the life and mind of a genius.” —USA Today
 
“A writer of rare elegance, distinction and, above all, passion. . . . Dazzling and deeply moving. . . . The cost of making art, and how much of it the artist and those around him should have to bear, is the deep subject of Kay Jamison’s magnificent study of a brilliant, wounded and lavishly gifted man.” —John Banville, The Irish Times
 
“Beautifully written. . . . Achieves a magnificence and intensity. . . . The book demands that readers seriously engage with its arguments. . . . Exhilarating.” —The Washington Post

Library Journal

09/15/2016
MacArthur Fellow Jamison, a Johns Hopkins professor of psychiatry whose best sellers include An Unquiet Mind, chronicles major American poet Robert Lowell's forthright showdown with bipolar illness by drawing on unprecedented access to Lowell's medical records, previously unpublished drafts and fragments of poems, and conversations with his daughter. Clarifying the relationship between mental illness and creativity.

MARCH 2017 - AudioFile

The subtitle of this audiobook summarizes it well: “A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character.” While it does cover the major events of the renowned American poet's life, it’s not a biography in the conventional sense. Instead, it’s a consideration of the relationship between his genius and his bipolar illness—by a psychologist who herself has bipolar illness. Narrator Jefferson Mays does a solid job with the text, which includes a great deal of prose and poetry from Lowell himself, as as well as from his friends, many of whom were also respected poets. The technical aspects of the psychological discussion remain clear as well. Lowell's prose overshadows Jamison's, but Mays gives the work of both writers appropriate weight, and he is particularly good with the poetry. For an extra treat, the book ends with Lowell reading one of his own poems, "Epilogue." D.M.H. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2016-11-15
A renowned psychologist connects bipolar disorder to creativity.MacArthur Fellow Jamison (Psychiatry/Johns Hopkins Univ. School of Medicine; Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir, 2009, etc.) brings her professional expertise to an intimate, sensitive, and perceptive account of the illness from which poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977) suffered most of his life: bipolar disorder, characterized by violent mood swings, an illness from which Jamison also suffers. Drawing on Lowell's medical records, Jamison closely examines the course of his disease and the various treatments—psychotherapy, electroconvulsive shock treatments, drug therapy—offered to Lowell as medical knowledge evolved. Mania has a long cultural and scientific history, which the author recounts in fascinating detail. Her focus, though, is on Lowell, who was first hospitalized in 1949; subsequent episodes recurred throughout his life, often requiring monthslong hospital stays. Lithium allowed him longer stretches of stability, but Jamison believes it dampened his creativity. Unfortunately for the narrative—and surely for Lowell—the onslaught and course of illness repeat the same trajectory: "the mind leaps; speech rushes; words ribbon out fast, unbidden, cutting. Ideas and schemes proliferate, alliances shift." Lowell suffered grandiose delusions, hallucinations, religious mania, and impetuous love affairs, much to the dismay of his second wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. Jamison offers chilling testimony of these episodes from Hardwick, Lowell's friends, and his doctors, and she mines Lowell's poetry and letters for his own responses. The author insists, as she has done in previous books, that mania corresponds to artistic brilliance and intellectual prowess; manic patients display "enhanced memory and originality"; biographical studies of individuals of "creative eminence" reveal a high rate of mental disorders; and students who perform exceptionally well in music and language "were four times more likely to be hospitalized later for bipolar disorder" than were average students. Similarly, records of 20 "socially important families" revealed that they were "saturated with manic-depressive psychosis." Jamison argues persuasively that mania fueled Lowell's poetry, but her celebration of psychosis seems to romanticize an affliction that she presents as devastating. A deeply informed investigation of a poet's suffering and creative triumph.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940171993146
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Publication date: 02/28/2017
Edition description: Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

No Tickets for That Altitude

The resident doctor said,

“We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm—

how can we help you?”

I asked,

“These days of only poems and depression—

what can I do with them?

Will they help me to notice

what I cannot bear to look at?”

—From “Notice”

“Darkness honestly lived through is a place of wonder and life,” Robert Lowell wrote. “So much has come from there.” It was October 1957 and he was forty, writing poetry “like a house a fire,” and taking darkness into “new country.” It was, he said, the best writing he had done, “closer to what I know” and “oh how welcome after four silent years.” The new poems became the heart of Life Studies, “perhaps the most influential book of modern verse since T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.” The poems, most written at the boil in a few months’ time, left their mark: “They have made a conquest,” wrote a reviewer. “They have won . . . ​a major expansion of the territory of poetry.”

In December 1957, after his summer and fall blaze of writing, Lowell was admitted to a mental hospital severely psychotic. It was his fifth psychiatric hospitalization in eight years. He was involuntarily committed to the Boston State Hospital and then transferred to the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (until 1956 known as Boston Psychopathic Hospital). In early 1958 he was transferred yet again, this time to McLean Hospital, where his great-­great-­grandmother had been institutionalized more than a hundred years earlier. The repetition of circumstance was not lost on Lowell; Life Studies had begun with a steeping in his ancestry. Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell, he had come to believe, was the one who had brought poetry into the Lowell line.

Lowell told the doctor who admitted him to the Massachusetts Mental Health Center that the preceding months, September and October 1957, had been “some of his most productive months of writing poetry.” It was the pattern he had come to know well: first, the weeks of intense, fiery writing. Then the spike into mania, and finally, as night follows day, the “dust in the blood” of depression. His psychiatrist wrote in Lowell’s medical chart what many of his doctors were to observe: “The patient has had a series of breaks,” she wrote, “all in the light of unusual literary output.” Much had come from the darkness, but not without a cost.

This book is about fire in the blood and darkness; it is about mania and the precarious, deranging altitude to which mania ascends. It is about the poetic imagination and how mania and imagination come together to create great art. But it is as much and more about the vital role of discipline and character in making art from inborn gift. Poetry may come from an unhappy and disordered life, Lowell wrote, “but a huge amount of health has to go into the misery.” Without question, Lowell’s attacks of mania spurred his work; they also brought pain to him and to those he loved. Things he had done when he was manic haunted him when he was well. They were public and they gave fodder to his detractors. Yet Lowell came back from madness time and again, reentered the fray, and kept intact his friendships. He kept his wit and his capacity to love. He went back to his work.

This faculty for regeneration is uncommon; so too is the courage to face, and to write from, the certainty of impending madness. Creating poetry that expands the territory is rarer still. Lowell’s poetic imagination was tethered to an unstable but disciplined mind; it forged his work and branded his life. Mania took his poetry where it would not have gone, to an altitude for which, as he wrote in the first poem of Life Studies, “there were no tickets.”

“My trouble,” Lowell wrote to his friend, the poet Elizabeth Bishop, is “to bring together in me the Puritanical iron hand of constraint and the gushes of pure wildness. One can’t survive or write without both but they need to come to terms. Rather narrow walking—.” Lowell turned to his use the warring elements of what one doctor described as a “rock crystal” will, “glittering, very hard, and very definite in its formation,” and the mania that lay almost beyond its reach; the fight gave a yield in art and a life graced but damaged. No measure of will could prevent madness, any more than it could bring down a storm at sea. It was the contending, the struggle, the effort that marked Lowell’s life and set the terms of his writing and ambition. A century earlier, Byron, no stranger to ungovernable moods, had written, “Yet see—he mastereth himself—& makes / His torture tributary to his will.” So too did Lowell.

This book is not a biography. I have written a psychological account of the life and mind of Robert Lowell; it is as well a narrative of the illness that so affected him, manic-­depressive illness. This disease of the brain bears down on all things that make us human: our moods, the way we see and experience the world, the way we think, our changing capacities of energy and will and imagination, our desires, the gift to create, our determination to live or die, our expectation of the future, our sanity.

My interest lies in the entanglement of art, character, mood, and intellect. My academic and clinical field is psychology and, within that, the study and treatment of manic-­depressive (bipolar) illness, the illness from which Robert Lowell suffered most of his life. I have studied as well the beholdenness of creative work to fluctuations in mood and the changes in thinking that attend such fluctuations. Mood disorders, depression, and bipolar illness, occur disproportionately often in writers, as well as in visual artists and composers. Studying the influence of both normal and pathological moods on creative work is critical to understanding how the mind imagines.

We know mania and depression to be ancient diseases, described by Hippocrates five hundred years before Christ and intensively studied by physicians and scientists in the centuries since. Mania is an unstable and complex state. It is seductive and blinding to those who are caught up in it, laden with risk and energy. It can bolt the mind into new regions and propel it to act upon ideas. Mania insinuates its way into its hosting brain: intoxicating enough to be dangerous, original enough to be valuable. Narrow walking indeed.

If it were only Robert Lowell afflicted by mania it still would bear thought because mania was a dominant force in the life and work of a major poet. Because it is a part of the lives of so many other writers and creators, however, it is of more general interest. Mania has had a subtle as well as a blunt impact on human history: it has struck those who founded religions and empires, discovered the laws of nature and mapped new lands; it has set fire to the imaginations of those who write, paint, and compose. Mania is important to understanding many who create; it occupies rare real estate in the brain, sharing permeable borders with the normal mind, madness, and imagination.

This book will explore the patterns of Robert Lowell’s mania and the mutability of his moods, as well as his long periods of depression, all of which shaped his temperament, character, thinking, and imagination. It will look at the forces Lowell brought to bear against his illness: his character and New England heritage; his discipline, intellect, capacity for friendship, and iron-­laced upbringing. Lowell had a severe form of manic depression. He fought to control, fend off, and make sense of his manic attacks and was acutely aware that his control was incomplete. Instability and the relentless recurrence of his illness hardened his discipline while mania impelled and stamped his work. Knowing that his sanity was subject to forces beyond his control marked his poetry and darkened his life philosophy.

“We face the precariousness of keeping alert, of keeping alive in the triple conflict between madness, death and life,” Lowell once said. “We must bend, not break.” Lowell was dealt a hand of cards high in privilege and poetic imagination but he also received dark cards, impossible to play, that broke him time and again. There are no rules for how to play such cards; no one is provided a map to navigate madness or depression. I will argue that Lowell played his cards with courage and imagination; above all, he did not fold. It would have been easy to do so. Much of his adult life was engaged in a battle against madness or fear that it would come back, contending with the suffering that it caused him, and the pain it caused others.

Nothing about Lowell’s mind was simple. The English poet and novelist Alan Brownjohn described spending time in his company: “We left feeling completely kind of drained, shattered, stupefied really . . . ​literary conversations with him were . . . ​tiring in the sense that you felt every nerve was stretched. It was partly the man’s knowledge, which was encyclopedic, partly the sort of darting perceptions and intuitions on behalf of you for what you were going to say next. He made links and connections for you in this slightly manic—and paranoid—way.”

Any attempt to understand such a mind must be partial and qualified; the usual limits of understanding another’s mind are compounded when trying to understand Lowell, a man who thought in metaphor, lived in history, and whose mind was engaged in a restless, stupendously elaborate game of three-­dimensional chess. Lowell’s mind was of a lurching, revising originality.

“Metaphor was his reality, not the original fact,” recounted his friend Esther Brooks. Lowell made her feel, his friend the literary critic Helen Vendler said, “like a rather backward evolutionary form confronted by an unknown but superior species. And when one asked what the name of the species was, the answer came unbidden: Poet.” Lowell, to the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, was “a man of genius”: complex, likable, and bewildering, he added, but a genius.

Lowell’s originality and breadth of thinking were matched by prodigious energy. Ideas flew. Brooks, a longtime friend, said that Lowell’s way of looking at things was “so completely original that you yourself began to see everything from a different perspective. Hours meant nothing to him when he was interested. Day turned into night and night back into day while he, with his seemingly limitless stamina, worried an idea, rejected it, discovered another, built mental pyramids, tore them down, discoursed on the habits of wolves, the Punic Wars, Dante, Napoleon, Shakespeare, Alexander the Great, politics, his friends, religion, his work, or the great noyade at Nantes. Whatever the subject it all came forth as though it were being pushed at you, helped on its way by that outward prodding palm. Sometimes this incredible energy of his would exhaust you and you would suddenly feel like screaming, or running away in search of some undefined moment, some unexamined fact, some purely sensuous reaction to beauty.”

I do not believe, as a psychologist or from my life, that anyone can more than partially understand the mind of another. When I teach psychiatry residents and graduate students about psychotherapy, I stress the respect one must keep for the abyss between what one thinks one knows and what one actually knows about another individual’s mental life. That abyss, unless its existence is kept in mind, will stand in the way of empathy and clinical acuity. We have a precarious understanding of our own thoughts and emotions, much less another’s. There are limits, but one can hope, within those limits, to create some sense of a life and to bring a fair mixture of compassion and dispassion to the task. Lowell’s mind, however many worlded and metaphoric, has a lighted way into it. His autobiographical writings, letters, poetry, and prose contain critical insight into his writing patterns and the evolution of his poetry; they allow a close look into his childhood and family, friendships, marriages, and the ongoing struggle he had with his mental illness. His letters, particularly, give a sense of who he was as a person, poet, father, and friend.

Looking back over thirty years of writing, Lowell said, “My impression is that the thread that strings it together is my autobiography.” Yet of course his poetry was spun from his imagination as well as from fact, and fact itself, like memory and mood, is mutable. “From year to year,” he wrote, “things remembered from the past change almost more than the present.” His “autobiographical poems,” he made clear, are “not always factually true. There’s a good deal of tinkering with fact. You leave out a lot, and emphasize this and not that. Your actual experience is a complete flux. I’ve invented facts and changed things, and the whole balance of the poem was something invented.” Yet, he said, if the writing is autobiographical, “you want the reader to say, this is true.” The memory mattered, certainly, but also imagination. He quoted the poet G. S. Fraser that there is a real sense “in which good poets are, when you meet them, like their works.”

Lowell’s letters, posted before revising and time could alter them, are particularly helpful in understanding his life. So too are the writings of those who knew him. Most of his friends and lovers, as well as the three women to whom he was married, were writers and described in detail his personality and work, as well as the dramatic changes in his behavior when he was manic. Lowell was interviewed at length by journalists and critics, and his primary biographer, Ian Hamilton, conducted comprehensive interviews with many of those who knew Lowell best. The original tape recordings of these interviews, together with Hamilton’s meticulous notes and correspondence, are of significant help in any attempt to understand Lowell. They are archived at the British Library and provide an invaluable portrait of Robert Lowell as a poet, husband, and friend. The interviews reveal the devastating impact of his mania on those who experienced his attacks at close hand, but they also give a good sense of why so many who knew him well loved him deeply.

Hamilton’s biography of Lowell, published in 1982, was carefully researched and written; it was widely read in the literary community and its impact on Lowell’s reputation as a poet and man was lasting and negative. The Lowell that Hamilton chose to portray is loutish, mad, humorless, a snob, and an overrated poet. There is much detail about Lowell’s breakdowns but relatively little about how his illness affected his poetry. Lowell’s capacity to live and work in the shadow of his madness is alluded to but not brought out in meaningful detail. His struggles and suffering, except for the suffering he caused to others, are not much in evidence. The cumulative and corrosive toll of Lowell’s disease on his personality, most apparent in the last years of his life when he lived in England, receives disproportionate weight over the longer years of his life in America when he was in better psychological health. Negative excerpts from reviews of Lowell’s work and interviews conducted by Hamilton predominate over the positive ones, which are given short shrift.

Artists and writers whose lives were spelled with madness and turmoil—Schumann, van Gogh, Woolf—have tended to attract sensationalist press and biography. Their art is crowded out by the drama of insanity or suicide. Irrational or shocking behavior makes better copy than the uses to which the turmoil is put and the discipline that shapes and constrains it. Hamilton’s biography of Lowell is no exception to this, perhaps in part because he knew Lowell toward the end of his life when Lowell’s mania was either on the simmer or full-­blown, pernicious; a time when his behavior was often abrasive and when he lived in the determining light of his fame and madness. Simon Gray, the playwright and a friend of Hamilton, acknowledges this. “Towards the end of the life of Robert Lowell,” Gray writes, “you can feel all Ian’s unwritten revulsion working its way through the prose.” Exactly because Hamilton did know Lowell and was, as well, a poet, his biography has had a lasting impact. Paul Mariani’s biography of Lowell, Lost Puritan, is more sympathetic—more human, more complex, more appreciative of both the man and his work—but it has been less ­influential.

“Robert Lowell was notably unlucky in Ian Hamilton’s major biography,” wrote the poet and critic Richard Tillinghast. “[It was] a damagingly wrong-­headed and skewed picture.” One could wish, he said, for an account that would give a more rounded picture of the man “his friends put up with, laughed about, became exasperated with, but always admired and deeply loved.” Another critic observed that “many readers and critics tend to regard Ian Hamilton’s 1982 biography as the book that broke the back of Robert Lowell’s reputation or, at the very least, turned his fame into infamy.” Jonathan Raban, a writer and friend of Lowell who knew him well, described the book as “pitiless and strangely incomprehending of his illness.”

Grey Gowrie, a poet, close friend, and pallbearer at Lowell’s funeral, concurs with the criticism of Hamilton’s biography. It “missed his humor. It got the snaffle and bit but is missing the horse. Lizzie [Elizabeth Hardwick, Lowell’s second wife] said after she read it that one would never know why we all loved and cared about him.” Hardwick’s point is one reiterated by many who knew Lowell best.

Lowell’s daughter, Harriet Winslow Lowell, believes that the relentless portrayal of madness fails to capture the father she knew: “Every serious story ends in buffoonish insanity, a manic affair and poetic reinvention,” she states. “The breakdowns did happen, but the real life was full of unknowns and possibilities. . . . The hilarity and fun of being with the man is inadequately conveyed. . . . He had an enormous capacity for regeneration, hard work and a desire to re-­connect with his family and friends on a deep level and engage with the world, in the midst of a deeply moving struggle with severe mental illness. Above all he was a poet. . . . He had a terrible disease, but was charming, mischievous and full of fun.” His view of the world was dark, she says, but he was not. “I am not trying to say the ill man did not cause real pain and also the well man. It was a messy life in many respects.”

I am indebted to Harriet Lowell, not only for talking with me about her father but for giving me permission to obtain and review his medical records. These provide a detailed account of his psychiatric illness and hospitalizations, as well as his thoughts and feelings about his illness and the relation of his mania and depression to his poetry. His fear that his illness would recur is palpable in the notes made by his doctors; so too is the remorse he felt over the hurt he caused his family and friends when manic. This is the first time that Lowell’s hospital records have been made available. (See Appendix 1 for details of obtaining and using these records.) It is also the first time that Lowell’s daughter has spoken about her father’s work, her memories of him as a father, and her parents’ marriage.

While I was doing the research for this book, Harriet Lowell asked if I would be interested in looking through the contents of the briefcase her father had been carrying with him at the time of his death in September 1977. It was a deeply moving thing to do. In addition to finding his glasses, his checkbook, a note from Elizabeth Bishop written to him shortly before he died, and a listing of the items he was carrying with him at the time he was pronounced dead at Roosevelt Hospital in New York, I came across a red hardbound appointment book. It contained more than two hundred pages of Lowell’s handwritten notes, including fragments and drafts of poems, many of which found their way into his last book, Day by Day. The notebook, previously unknown, spans a critical year in Lowell’s life, 1973, a year in which he published three volumes of verse, two of them to blistering controversy, one that received the Pulitzer Prize. During 1973, Lowell’s poetry changed significantly in tone and focus. The writing in the notebook—marked by themes of wandering and an agitated search for home, for peace; of madness; of love and aging and death—is valedictory and wrenching.

I have drawn upon this notebook, together with Lowell’s medical and psychiatric records, interviews I conducted with many of those who knew him well, and the existing literary, biographical, and autobiographical material, to give what I hope is a fresh reading of Lowell’s life and work.

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