I am interested in who Robert Lowell was, how he came to be the man and poet he was, and why his poetry matters; in what we can learn from his work about the ambition of art, the necessity for art; courage, suffering, family; the fragility of sanity, the certainty of death, and the strands that link madness to action and imagination. And, in this promising, scrambling, pelting age of neuroscience, I am particularly interested in why character—courage, hard work, discipline, holding to one’s true north—matters so deeply in understanding both art and mental illness.
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I believe that mania and genius not uncommonly exist together, that suffering can be brought to some good, that the fast swither of mania can fire ambition, steel the nerve, and give high wind to imagination. If checked by discipline, and made flesh and blood by experience, doubt, and despair, they can forge great art. They did this in the work of Robert Lowell.
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The Archangel Loved Heights
Timur said something like: “The drop of water
that fails to become a river is food for the dust.
The eye that cannot size up the Bosphorus
in a single drop is an acorn, not the eye of a man.”
—From “Fame”
When he was nineteen years old, Robert Lowell wrote to Ezra Pound asking to study with him in Italy. He had ambition and nerve. He went after what he wanted. “All my life I have been eccentric,” he wrote. “I had violent passions for various pursuits usually taking the form of collecting: tools; names of birds; marbles; catching butterflies, snakes, turtles etc.; buying books on Napoleon. None of this led anywhere, I was more interested in collecting large numbers than in developing them.” He had caught more than thirty turtles, he explained, and “put them in a well where they died of insufficient feeding.” His collections of objects had overtaken the available space. Sometimes, “overcome by the collecting mania,” he wrote, “I would steal things I wanted.” He had never lived in the “usual realities”; he was “proud, somewhat sullen and violent.” He chafed against the “insipid blackness of the Episcopalian church” and had turned instead to Zeus and Homer. Zeus’s world was enticing, morally complex, and one that “blinked at no realities.”
He had spent a summer with two friends on Nantucket, he continued, “dedicating themselves to art.” Their hours and habits had been strictly regimented: no smoking, meals of grain, cooked eels, and honey. They wrote and read—Job, Wordsworth, Blake, Shakespeare, Coleridge—and took a high oath to be serious in their work. The insistence on near-monastic order, imposed by Lowell, was perceived by his friends as a seductive form of pale tyranny: “I wasn’t really afraid of him,” said one of his friends, but he was overwhelmed. “I think my picture of our friendship is of Aesop’s bronze vessel and clay vessel crossing the stream. The bronze vessel says: ‘Come and help me, give me company.’ And the clay vessel foolishly does it and is jostled and of course the clay breaks and the bronze goes on. I think I rather saw myself as the clay vessel there.” By the end of their time in Nantucket Lowell proclaimed that he had begun to “understand God” and had grown “to love my art, and those who were great in it.”
Lowell’s novitiate summer in Nantucket, he explained to Pound, had changed the game: “Since then I have been sucking in atmosphere, reading; and dreaming. Writing and trying to help one or two friends have been the only real things in life for me. At college I have yearned after iron and have been choked with cobwebs…no one here is really fighting.” He ended his entreaty to Pound in passion and a plea to be taken seriously: “Your Cantos have re-created what I have imagined to be the blood of Homer. Again I ask you to have me. You shan’t be sorry, I will bring the steel and fire, I am not theatric, and my life is sober not sensational.”
It would be a remarkable letter coming from anyone, and it was the more so for coming from a first-year college student criticized for a lack of purpose by his parents, teachers, and doctors alike. It has the boldness and directness of his poems and prose; it is infused with the grandiosity and will of someone who knows where he wants to go and is set upon finding out how to get there. He was determined, he wrote to Pound a few months later, “to bring back momentum and movement in poetry on a grand scale….[I] will throw myself into the fight and stay there.” He was forming himself, certain that he could: creating himself into a serious writer of great ambition who would use the extreme, contrasting forces in his mind to lasting artistic effect. Art was constant, if the mind was not.
Frank Bidart, a poet and friend who later worked closely with Lowell, underscored the seriousness of Lowell’s ambition: “He once said to me, ‘When I’m dead, I don’t care what you write about me; all I ask is that it be serious.’ This sentence reflects, I think, the relentless mind that disturbed so many people, even friends and family. In a central way, Robert Lowell was not quite civilized. However courtly or charming, casual or playful, he was by turns, in his art and his personal relationships, Lowell was unfashionably—even, at times, ruthlessly—serious.” He would not drift or be incidental.
Lowell’s seriousness of purpose helped to frame his ambition, a wide capacity that spanned his expansive imagination and the manic illness that now and again would catapult him into delusion. Vaulting ambition had been his since childhood; maddened grandiosities came to him later, first in ecstatic faith and then in mania’s “twists of fire.” When Lowell had the ruthless conqueror Timur say, “The drop of water / that fails to become a river is food for the dust,” it was clear that Lowell aligned with the river, not the dust.
A great canvas was to be necessary for Lowell’s work, one that yoked a passion for greatness with the vastness of scale he admired in other writers. Ambition tied the writers together, slung them upward, broke some.
“The Archangel loved heights,” Henry Adams wrote in Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. “Standing on the summit of the tower that crowned his church, wings upspread, sword uplifted, the devil crawling beneath…Saint Michael held a place of his own in heaven and on earth….His place was where the danger was greatest.” No one could touch Henry Adams, said Lowell. And like Adams’s Archangel, Lowell loved heights and did not turn his back on danger. He would hold a place of his own. He would set the river on fire.
Lowell took faith in his ambition by looking to other writers. Melville and Hawthorne, he said, “pour out more than the measure will hold. What wonderful dangers, errors, condescensions and breathless abundance!” Melville’s vastness was of a different order than Lowell’s—“Give me a condor’s quill!” Melville had proclaimed. “Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!…as if to include…all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe not excluding its suburbs”—but both Lowell and Melville wrote to change the game. Pasternak—whose poetry Lowell admired and translated and whose Doctor Zhivago had staggered him by the sweep of its story and sheer ambition—spoke to the role of greatness, and the aspiration to greatness, in art: “Greatness, greatness, above all else….One must be great or learn to achieve greatness….One must have moved mountains—actually moved them, and not merely claimed to have done so; and having moved them, one must move on to new goals.”
Pasternak, Lowell, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman: like Coleridge, all were “habituated to the Vast”; they swung for the fences. Lowell was “excited by greatness, by comparing greatness,” Alfred Kazin wrote in his journal. “His sense of greatness, his sense of the great work, of the great moment in the great work, made me feel, again, as if I were breathing the unfamiliar, pure air at the mountain peak.” Lowell’s poetry, said John Berryman, “displays, in high degrees, passion, vista, burden.” His ambition, he added, “is limitless.”
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Lowell’s habitation of the vast, his frictionless slides into history, and his comfort in the company of the great meant that he learned from the great writers, historians, and epic heroes in a rare and immediate way; it placed him in an unbounded field under a high canopy. “Immense ambitio
n was always central to his poetic ambition,” observes the poet Dana Gioia. “He wanted to be the American Milton.” Frank Bidart said that Lowell’s poems “don’t settle down into the comfortably grand and dead. They always suggest a vastness of feeling—like touching a wire that has electricity in it. He was an audacious maker.”
Ambition, an acute sense and longing for a place among the great, widens the imagination and emboldens it. Too little ambition narrows the emotional and imaginative field; it makes it less likely that risks will be taken and new territory seized. But ambition carries risk. It shares space with self-deception; it can cross into grandiosity and, more rarely, into madness. If one punches a hole in the sky there can be no certainty about what is beyond.
Lowell’s behavior at the time he was committed to the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in 1957 provides an example of the open boundaries between poetic ambition, obsession, and clinical grandiosity. Two facts were clear at the time of his admission to the hospital. First, Lowell was indisputably psychotic. Second, he had just written many of the poems that would make up Life Studies, one of the most influential books of poetry of the twentieth century. The psychiatrist’s admission note is particularly interesting in this light: “There is undue preoccupation with greatness,” Dr. Marian Woolston wrote about Lowell, “almost a sense of mission in making a new contribution. He has a great need to be not only good but unique among poets—[this] need for greatness was early established.” He was obsessed with being among the great, she continued. “He wanted to be a second Dante and actually thought he could be.” (Lowell at times not only aspired to be ranked with Dante but thought that he was Dante. At different times, in different hospitals, he believed himself to be T. S. Eliot or Shakespeare or Homer and revised their works accordingly.) Ambition, imagination, and delusion reside in close quarters of the mind. Research bears this out: individuals with a history of mania have much higher levels of ambition and expectation of success.
From childhood, Lowell had shown a striking capacity to conjure and live alongside the great figures of history. “History lived in his nerves,” said Derek Walcott. Lowell “gossiped about the English poets the way other people gossip about their friends,” recalled James Atlas. “He spoke of them as if they were colleagues and contemporaries.” Helen Vendler wrote that Lowell gave his poetry students the sense “of a life, a spirit, a mind, and a set of occasions from which writing issues—a real life, a real mind, fixed in historical circumstance and quotidian abrasions.” History gave Lowell an intellectual structure, Vendler continued, “a frame into which everything could be put…an independent vantage point from which to write as soon as he drew back from the moment and contemplated life and the world more largely.” Other poets of his time who also had mental illness, and there were many, were “more deeply locked into the personal.”
Almost everyone who knew Lowell remarked on his affinity for the past, his easy transit into historical times, his unrivaled comfort with those long dead. “Surfacing constantly in what Cal says, are touchstones from all levels of history,” said the poet Philip Booth. “Cal is like an archeologist at a dig-site; there are ages and ages under him.” Another friend observed that “the great past, Revolutionary America, the Renaissance, Rome, is all contemporary to him. He moves among its great figures at ease with his peers.” He is “the man who on a very large scale sees more, feels more, and speaks more bravely about it than we ourselves can do.”
Like Henry Adams, who lived by “shuttle-like movements of his thought, from present to past, from past to present” and who saw no obvious demarcation between the past and the present, Lowell too “pulled the present age backward into the past, and jammed the past into the present.” “He was a survivor from another age,” recounts Jonathan Raban. “You felt like you were meeting a seventeenth-century poet at times. His capacity to make himself contemporary to Marvell. To Yeats.” He had an unparalleled historical imagination, said Robert Fitzgerald, the translator of Homer and Sophocles. “He could hold the world of archaic Rome and the world of contemporary Washington together in his mind.”
Not long ago, a scientist touched the carcass of a baby mammoth that had been preserved in the Siberian ice for thirty thousand years. “I laid my hand on its skin and felt a chill,” he said. “I had touched the Stone Age.” Lowell laid his hand on history.
The past had always exerted a vivid grip on him, said Lowell. His mother read Hawthorne’s Greek Myths to him when he was a child, and the stories fixed themselves to his imagination, like limpets to a sea rock. “Sometimes when I am trying to go to sleep,” he said years later, “I can almost touch these people and talk to them. If I read some false, modern retelling of the old stories, I say to myself, ‘This isn’t the way it happened. I was there.’…Hawthorne’s fables are history to me, and just as much fact as the earth, the water, and the sky.” Fables were history for Lowell and history was fact; all were earth and water and sky. He took these imagined worlds into him; he drew upon them when he was sane and fell into them without a map when he was mad.
The chief charm of New England was harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility—a cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it—so that the pleasure of hating—one’s self if no better victim offered—was not its rarest amusement; but the charm was a true and natural child of the soil, not a cultivated weed of the ancients. The violence of the contrast was real and made the strongest motive of education.
—HENRY ADAMS, THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS
Henry Adams, believed Robert Lowell, was “our greatest man maybe, certainly the greatest New Englander.” No one could touch Adams, he said: he was wonderful on so many things, including “his and our manic-depressive New England character.” Like Adams, Lowell was New England to bone and marrow. Both had been “born under the shadow of the Dome of the Boston State House,” both carried the weight and privilege of family names—Henry Adams was the grandson and great-grandson of presidents and, like Lowell, traced his ancestry to the Mayflower. More important, they had much in common by way of temperament and the way they experienced life. Adams and Lowell were skeptics, marked by the “habit of doubt,” and they were natively contrary. Intent on navigating life in ways that made sense to them, if not to others, they took covenant with the idea that to learn best one taught oneself or sought out those able to teach what was needed.
Lowell and Adams, restive members of their tribes, shared minds that were shaped by contrast and ruled by flux; their temperaments were fine wired to light, season, and experience. Mutability in mood and will, cycles of passivity and wildness—integral not only to their temperaments but to the manic-depressive illness Lowell was heir to—these were laid out by Henry Adams in his autobiographical masterpiece The Education of Henry Adams.
The double nature of “a cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it” gave life its relative value, he wrote: “Winter and summer, cold and heat, town and country, force and freedom, marked two modes of life and thought, balanced like lobes of the brain. Town was winter confinement, school, rule, discipline; straight, gloomy streets, piled with six feet of snow in the middle; frosts that made the snow sing under wheels or runners; thaws when the street became dangerous to cross….Above all else, winter represented the desire to escape and go free.”
Summer, on the other hand, “was drunken.” The New England boy was wild, like all boys, but he had a “wider range of emotions than boys of more equable climates.” To the New England boy, winter was and always would be the “effort to live.” Summer in its expansiveness, its long fields and full orchards, its infinite sensation: summer was freedom, it was “tropical license.” It brimmed with life; it gave; it flew. Winter was dead, dangerous; it dragged and discomfited. The contrast between winter and summer, Adams wrote, was the most decisive force he would ever know: “It ran through life, and made the division between its perplexing, warring, irreconcilable problems, irreducible opposites.” From youth he knew that life
was double, that the multiplicity of the self was elemental. The tidal rhythms pulsing in the marrow of Henry Adams found a responsive place in Lowell’s imagination; he held a debt to Adams for giving witness to the nervous forces at the heart of life and to the full-blooded call of memory.
Lowell returned often to Henry Adams. To an extent he modeled his autobiographical “91 Revere Street” in Life Studies on Adams’s autobiography. In his poem “Henry Adams 1850,” written when he was in his fifties, Lowell, as was his wont, borrowed freely and created uniquely. He used Adams’s words to capture the experiences of childhood that had stamped Adams’s “menaced” and “knowingly sensuous mind”:
Adams’ connection with Boston was singularly cool;
winter and summer were two hostile lives,
summer was multiplicity, winter was school.
“We went into the pinewoods, netted crabs,
boated the saltmarsh in view of the autumn hills.
Boys are wild animals, I felt nature crudely,
I was a New England boy—summer was drunken,
poled through the saltmarsh at low tide.”
The summers and winters of Henry Adams’s New England stayed in Lowell. He knew their extremes, he had lived them. The New England country, wrote Lowell, was “a world I knew mostly from summer and weekend dips into it. It was a boy’s world, fresher, granier, tougher, and freer than the city where I had to live.” Antithetical forces, within and outside the self, metaphoric and literal, became a part of how his mind wrote the world. The task was to take the wind and sun when he could, endure the cold, and put his shoulder to the wheel to make sense of the irreconcilable. One gained will by exerting it.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 3