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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Ideas fly, often into madness; mania switches from the rapturous and clever into the baffling and bizarre. Lowell, in a letter to William Empson written the day before being committed to McLean Hospital in 1958, showed this loose-strung flying of ideas. The Garden of Eden unspooled into God’s “pre-verbal” ways, into Christ’s mania, into Lowell’s mania. From there, his mental associations shot to Christ’s/Lowell’s depression, to the machines set up by Christ and Saint Paul, to the Mass and its composers, to Christ climbing to his feet after having undergone electric shock treatment. And there it stopped, at least on the page.

  In “Visitors,” a poem from Lowell’s last book, Day by Day, an ambulance arrives to take the writer to the mental hospital. His mind skips; then it doesn’t. Words stop. Virgil’s journey winds back upon itself, paradise falls hellward:

  “Come on, sir.” “Easy, sir.”

  “Dr. Brown will be here in ten minutes, sir.”

  Instead, a metal chair unfolds into a stretcher.

  I lie secured there, but for my skipping mind.

  They keep bustling.

  “Where you are going, Professor,

  you won’t need your Dante.”

  What will I need there?

  Is that a handcuff rattling in a pocket?

  I follow my own removal,

  stiffly, gratefully even, but without feeling.

  Why has my talkative

  teasing tongue stopped talking?

  My detachment must be paid for,

  tomorrow will be worse than today,

  heaven and hell will be the same.

  The Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, while acknowledging that the pelting stream of ideas may be unpleasant to patients, suggested that there may be advantage to those artistically talented. “Because of the more rapid flow of ideas, and especially because of the falling off of inhibitions,” he wrote, “artistic activities are facilitated even though something worth while is produced only in very mild cases and when the patient is otherwise talented in this direction.” It is this facilitation that commands attention. As does the caveat that carries the deepest weight: otherwise talented.

  When mania swept through Robert Lowell’s brain it did not enter unoccupied space. It came into dense territory, thick with learning, metaphor, and history; filled with the language and images of Virgil and Homer, the violent rhythms of Nantucket whaling; a decaying Puritan burial ground stacked with ancestors and ambiguity; the words and moods of New England writers, Hawthorne and Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and Henry Adams, Jonathan Edwards; and the thicket of memories kept by a sensitive and observant child reeling within his family. The words of Dante, Shakespeare, Pasternak, Hardy, and Milton were not just in his mind but were his mind, kept alongside the place he kept for Dutch paintings and Beethoven’s late quartets. Lowell’s mind had been stamped by words and shaped by shifting moods; always, it had been beholden to words. Mania, when it came, shook his memory as a child shakes a snow globe.

  When Lowell was well, which was most of the time, his mind was fast, compound, legendary. The depth of his knowledge and the relentless seriousness with which he acquired and used it were spoken to by virtually all who knew or studied with him. His was a retentive and elaborating mind; brilliant, all encompassing; a labyrinth of myth and language and experience. When mania attacked it advanced on a well-used and comprehended library of history and life, a field of ideas that could not be crossed. Mania attacked in the way characteristic of mania, a stereotypic assault, but the brain it set afire was rare in its capacity, seriousness, and discipline.

  Seamus Heaney, in his memorial address for Lowell, spoke of Lowell’s “amphibious” mind and iron discipline. “The molten stuff of the psyche ran hot and unstanched,” he said, “but its final form was as much beaten as poured, the cooling ingot was assiduously hammered.” Lowell went “into the downward reptilian welter of the individual self and yet [was able to] raise himself with whatever knowledge he gained there out on the hard ledges of the historical present.”

  Lowell’s mind, said his friend Esther Brooks, was “so original, so perceptive, so finely wrought, that it seemed to intuit sensory experience without reacting directly to it.” It was a mind that reached out and retained. And then wrought. The poet Stephen Spender wrote, “I more than envy the wonderful freedom with which you call in diverse experiences and references, like birds from the air, so that even the wildest things eat out of your hand.” Wild things came into his mind, stayed until they found their place to go.

  Lowell believed that poetry demanded “not just a technical mastery but also a human suppleness and range of response,” wrote the critic Al Alvarez, qualities that were “everywhere in his nervous, flexible line, his sudden electric connections between literature and politics, history and sex, painting and marriage.” Each year, mania set the range on fire.

  Mania did not make Lowell a great poet; he was that before he was ever recognizably manic. But it was a determining force at times, driving rhythm and content. And, after long-drawn-out periods of no writing, it disturbed the embers and breathed back the life into his poetry. As he said to doctor after doctor, if he could control the mania rather than the mania controlling him, he would welcome it for his poetry’s sake.

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  Why mania and milder states of excitement influence creativity is becoming better understood. The increase in speed of thinking so typical of mania, for example, may affect creativity in several ways. The increased number of ideas and associations is important in its own right. But this increase in quantity can influence the quality of thought as well; that is, the speed may so increase the volume of thinking as to change the nature of the thoughts themselves. From this may stem yet more originality of ideas and associations.

  Some studies—the biographical ones discussed earlier, for example—use artists and writers whose designation as highly creative would not come into question. Most recent research, however, involves students or patients in laboratory situations. For these, scientists require more specific and universal criteria for creativity; the definition most widely used by psychologists is that creativity is the generation of ideas that are both novel and useful. The ideas can be of such an impact that they have a major influence on history, or they can be solutions to problems that arise in everyday living and affect only a few. There are many questions that arise in defining and measuring creativity, and, not surprisingly, an extensive research literature addresses these issues.

  There are divers tests of creativity. The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, for example, are well validated and have been used for more than fifty years. They assess, among other things, fluency of thinking, originality, abstraction, richness and colorfulness of imagery, and fantasy. The Torrance Tests use a variety of tasks, including asking those being tested to come up with as many uses as possible for an object, such as a book or a tin can; to list as many “impossibilities” as possible (a nod perhaps to the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass: “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”); to write “exciting and interesting” stories; to list all the things that might have happened when the cow jumped over the moon; to elaborate on physical representations or incomplete figures. Other frequently used measures of creativity are tests of word association or word fluency in which the individual is asked to give as many responses as he or she can produce to a test word, for example, to “moth” or “snowflake.” The total number of responses, as well as the originality of the responses, is one gauge of creative thought.

  Creativity and intelligence share characteristics and correlate with each other, but only to a point. An IQ in the general range of 120 seems to be the necessary minimum for moderate to high creativity, but after that point IQ and creativity go somewhat separate ways. Many people who are highly intelligent are not creative and many creative individuals do not score in the highest ranges of intelligence. Intelligence and creativity alike have a strong genetic base; the gen
etic contributions are estimated to be at least 50 percent.

  Recently, neuroscientists have been attempting to study creative thought through neuroimaging, or brain scanning techniques. The methods are promising, but at this early stage of research they are difficult to interpret and inconsistent in their findings. A review of forty-five brain-imaging studies of creative thinking, for example, found that the wide diversity of measures of creativity and variability in neuroimaging methods made it impossible to draw definite conclusions. But it is clear from the recent history of scanning in medicine and neuroscience that the technology improves rapidly. Not too far into the future we will know a great deal more about the circuitry of the creative brain and the manic brain; we will know where they overlap and where they diverge.

  Other scientific approaches used in studies of psychopathology, elated mood, and creativity have been quite consistent, however. There is a significant link among several pathological traits, especially those associated with mania, and measures of creativity. Early studies, including those done by Emil Kraepelin and his contemporaries, found that rhymes, punning, and sound associations increase during flight of ideas; many manic patients were observed to spontaneously start writing poetry. Psychologists have shown since that symptoms associated with mania, particularly flight of ideas, contribute to performance on tests measuring creativity. In studies of word fluency and association, researchers have found that the total number of responses given on a word association task increases threefold during mania; the number of predictable, that is, statistically common, responses falls by one-third. Lithium, presumably through its effect on manic thinking such as flight of ideas, has the reverse effect. Although the short-term use of lithium does not appear to affect creativity in normal individuals, in those who have a history of mania lithium decreases associational fluency and the originality of responses. The higher the lithium blood level the greater the dampening effect on verbal fluency.

  In mania and excited states, elated mood contributes to creative thought. The evidence for this is strong and comes from many directions. Early clinical observers noted that manic patients who were elated were especially likely to exhibit flight of ideas. In 1858, Franz Richarz, the German psychiatrist who treated Robert Schumann during his final years in an asylum, described the importance of euphoric mood in the linking of thoughts. Sound, rhythm, and content were key and, he thought, closely tied to elation. In euphoric mania, Richarz wrote, “thoughts tend to form strings of ideas…that link together by their content, alliteration, or assonance.” Euphoria encouraged association and rhythm. When euphoria was absent, and the manic patient’s mood was one of unease and irritability, ideas sped, but differently: “The ideas come and go rapidly as if they were hunting each other, or continuously overlapping without any link between them.” Thoughts crowded the mind but did not tie together in a pattern. The imaginative links were significantly beholden to elated mood.

  A more recent study of one hundred acutely manic patients found, as had Richarz, that euphoric manic patients were more likely than those who were predominantly irritable to show flight of ideas. The patients with elated mania were also more likely to be expansive and grandiose. In 1946, researchers at the Payne Whitney Clinic in New York studied associational fluency in different groups of patients—manic-depressive, depressive, schizophrenic—and found that the patients with manic-depressive illness scored the highest on verbal fluency. Across all patient groups, patients scored higher when their mood was elated than when it was not.

  During their attacks, manic patients generate many more word associations than normal individuals or patients with major depression or schizophrenia; they also use broader conceptual categories, a tendency they share with creative individuals. Some of this is due to the expansive mood and grandiosity that are so often a part of mania. Some of it may be due to the distractibility and attentional problems that many patients with bipolar illness experience, both while they are well and far more so when they are manic. Difficulty in maintaining attention generally has a negative effect on personal and professional success, but many studies show that it can be of some advantage in noticing things that others do not and combining observations in an original way. Psychologists studying latent inhibition, the capacity of the brain to screen objects or events that have been determined by experience to be “irrelevant,” find that both highly creative individuals and individuals prone to psychosis tend not to screen out these “irrelevant details.” This lack of filtering thus casts the net of attention over a wider range of objects; more ideas or objects are taken into awareness, then are available to be combined in original ways.

  Lowell, in his essay “Hawthorne’s Pegasus,” writes to this point, the importance of indirection and glide in imagination. The child who will become a poet or storyteller knows that he cannot see “the marvelous winged” Pegasus by “trying to look directly at it, by gaping at the sky, or by hiking over the hot Greek hills. Only by letting his thoughts wander and wonder over the water’s surface will he snatch up a reflection—it is just a common white gull’s wing at first—and this will be the horse.” Focus takes a toll on vision.

  It is possible that once captivated by an idea or observation the scattered manic mind, paradoxically calmed by the enthusiasm that attends it, can settle into sustained concentration. Elated mood may act on diffuse bipolar thinking in a way analogous to how stimulants act in attention deficit disorder. In exuberant play, children and young animals display a similar pattern. They are distractible and far-flung over the field until their diffuse attention secures a point of interest. Then they focus their thinking and way of exploration. When Lowell was tested by psychologists as a young adolescent, he showed a striking inability to pay attention to the task at hand. Yet at the right time, when held by the beauty or complexity of the problem in front of him, he was formidable in his ability to focus intently on his work, hold his focus until a problem was solved, until the next high tide.

  Artists and writers often report that elevated mood precedes periods of intense creative work. The majority of the British writers and artists in my study, for example, reported that during the preceding thirty-six months, sharp increases in their mood came just prior to periods of highly creative work. Researchers at Harvard University found that the great majority of their manic-depressive patients reported a greatly elevated mood when they were most creative. Both the British writers and artists and the American patients reported that these elevated mood states were characterized by ease and speed of thinking, expansiveness, and the effortless generation of new ideas. It is natural to expect that increased creativity should lead to a high or elevated mood. It is as, or more, likely that high mood leads to greater creativity.

  Periods of high mood drive creativity; intense creative work may escalate mood yet higher. For those prone to mania the risk grows dramatically, particularly if the excitement of writing or composing leads to less sleep and more drinking. Lowell’s mother, Lowell, and Elizabeth Hardwick all believed writing poetry could excite Lowell into mania. As early as 1943, Lowell’s mother blamed his poet friends for pushing him over the edge with the “emotional excitement of poetry.” When he was first hospitalized in 1949 she wrote that the doctors felt his illness was due in large part to overwork, overstimulation, and mental strain. Elizabeth Hardwick was glad for the respite that prose writing brought him since prose, unlike poetry, “need not thrive…on bouts of enthusiasm.” This overheating of the poetic brain has long been a topic for physicians and philosophers. “Men of genius,” declared Thomas Middleton Stuart in an 1819 essay, “Genius and Its Diseases,” are like “some noble bird of heaven, stretching its flight towards ethereal regions, which soars and soars, unconscious of fatigue and reckless of danger, till it dies in the clouds.” The man of genius, Dr. Stuart said, should “divert his mind” and “break in upon those strong associations which else might lead to evil consequences.” He must take care. He must be tended. He must sleep. The brain was hot,
Virginia Woolf had said less floridly.

  The findings from studies that temporarily induce elevated mood in experimental subjects—through music, for example—also support the idea that positive mood enhances verbal fluency, more flexible thought, and a greater ability to solve problems in original ways; makes the subject see more relationships among ideas that at first appear to be unrelated; and encourages active exploration. Most of these studies use university students, not writers or artists of unquestioned creativity. Most do not use individuals who have a history of mania. The induced mood is generally mild, not comparable even to the earliest stages of mania; the subjects have been given champagne, in effect, not cocaine. Yet the results are quite consistent and provide a different perspective on elevated mood and creativity.

  That positive mood increases creative thinking seems not unexpected, but how it does so, and why, is less obvious. Perhaps positive mood is incompatible with anxiety and other emotional states that interfere with generative thinking. There is evidence to support this; for example, scientists recently showed that when they stimulated areas in the brains of mice that usually are activated by pleasurable experiences, they protected them from the depressive consequences of stress. Perhaps we have evolved a specificity of mood to task; for example, researchers find that individuals in whom a positive mood has been induced do well on verbal tasks but less well on visual ones. The opposite is true when an anxious state has been induced. Since detecting physical danger is largely based on visual cues, the primitive emotion of anxiety may be wired better to serve visual perception. Language, on the other hand, newer to the brain, may be more linked to those parts that regulate dopamine and thereby connected to pleasure.

  Dopamine, a neurotransmitter that long predates our mammalian ancestors, was a regulator of brain function in species that lived more than half a billion years ago. It controls mood, attention, movement and is central to reward; it strongly influences exploratory behavior as well. Dopamine is also strongly implicated in mania. Clinical research shows that drugs that decrease dopamine levels also decrease symptoms of mania. Some patients with Parkinson’s disease, an illness characterized by a depletion of dopamine, given dopamine-enhancing drugs, have shown unexpected spurts of creativity. The same drugs not uncommonly induce mild expressions of mania. Certainly positive mood is associated with increased dopamine levels in the brain and abrupt release of dopamine may stimulate an individual to chase, explore, or advantageously notice.