Elms in Castine, Maine
“I was lying on my bed…watching the tops of the elms.” Credit 38
The patient has had a series of breaks, all in the light of unusual literary output.
—HOSPITAL ADMISSION NOTE, DECEMBER 1957
A connection between Robert Lowell’s manic-depressive illness and his poetry was readily apparent to Lowell’s psychiatrists as well as to most of his friends and colleagues. Lowell and his doctors observed a clear link between the onset of mania and a marked increase in the fluency of his words and the amount he wrote. Dr. Erik Linnolt, Lowell’s psychiatrist during his stays at the Hartford Institute of Living in 1962, 1963, and 1965, stated that “Lowell felt that the early stages of his mania came with increasing creativity and flow of words. He felt his illness was part of him and his work.” Dr. John Blitzer, Lowell’s psychiatrist at Payne Whitney in 1949, recorded in his medical notes that Lowell had experienced repeated periods of elation and mania that were characterized by greatly increased creativity and “coincided with the patient’s beginning some new [literary] project.” Lowell’s “strong emotional ties with his manic phase were very evident,” he observed. “Besides the feeling of well-being,” Lowell told his doctor, his “senses were more keen than they had ever been before, and that’s what a writer needs.” Five years later, during his second stay in Payne Whitney, Lowell told his psychiatrist that he wrote best when he was “a little too excited.” When manic and “elated of being Christ,” he said, “confidence was all-present” and he was certain that “everything will work out. There is an order of things.” Lowell explained that he took the images and ideas he had when he was manic and, after he was no longer psychotic, he assembled the bits; he carved his poems from them.
Throughout the intensely creative months of 1957, during which Lowell wrote most of the poems for Life Studies, he told his doctors that his pattern of illness and writing was the same as it always had been: his mood had been elated, his mind raced, he spoke too much, did too much, and he slept too little. Most important, he said, when he was manic, poetry came far more easily to him than when he was well; it was fresher, radical, more original. When he was admitted to Boston State Hospital in December, he told the admitting psychiatrist that he “might be having another manic episode because he had been writing with increased facility for the past several months.” He had begun or completed “Skunk Hour,” “Man and Wife,” “ ‘To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,’ ” “Beyond the Alps,” and several of the other poems that were to be in Life Studies.
As time went by, writing fast, furious, and near ceaselessly became a warning symptom of impending mania, along with falling in love and beginning a new affair or grandiose delusions when he declared himself to be Dante or Alexander the Great. When Lowell was transferred to the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in December 1957, Dr. Marian Woolston drew up a summary of Lowell’s writing patterns and his manic illness:
From February until April 1949 the patient’s literature included no productive writing.
In September and October 1957 the patient enjoyed some of his most productive months of writing poetry.
About one month prior to admission, this being sometime in November [1957], the patient ceased his great spurt of writing.
The patient has consistently been almost explosive in his outputs of energy. His life history is characterized by temporary complete engrossment in his writings which has always been accompanied by verbal hyperactivity sometimes to the point of an acute breakdown.
Many of the friends and colleagues who knew him best agreed with the psychiatrists who treated him that Lowell wrote much more poetry during the time leading up to mania. He then extensively revised the raw poems, or fragments of poems, when he was depressed or recovering from mania. They did not all agree about the quality. In 1975 Lowell told his London doctor, “I write my best poetry when I’m manic.” The doctor had his doubts. Raving was not the same as creating, he said.
The painter Sidney Nolan, a friend of Lowell, was asked what he thought the effect of Lowell’s mania was on his writing. “I noticed that at a certain point—from when he was dead sane to when he started to bubble a bit—he would get witty and write very good poetry. Then it would go further and further and then he’d get the poems a bit confused. And then he’d go further and it was all completely confused. But for that period of, well, fizz—he was writing good poetry. He tended to spoil early poems when he was ill. I came to the conclusion, though, that there was a connection between the dead-on syntax and him being a bit goofy.”
Ten years earlier, Allen Ginsberg had talked with Lowell, who was, at the time, on the way to the hospital for a “rest cure.” Lowell told him that “the particular hopped-up state of mind in which he found himself was precisely the state of mind in which his best ideas for poetry occurred.” The manic attacks that put Lowell in the hospital, said the classicist Robert Fitzgerald, were brought on by his having been “overborne by the fever that one felt to be just beyond some of his poems from the beginning.” The fever that brought his mind alive was the same fever that could destroy it.
The writer Jonathan Raban, as a friend of Lowell and editor of his selected poems, was in a particularly good position to observe the relationship between Lowell’s mania and his poetry. He told Ian Hamilton that Lowell’s manic-depressive illness was closely aligned to his work: “The affliction was so like the poetry—the way the metaphors got released, the way that all the teasing and verbal games that he’d play ordinarily would become totally consuming activities in this affliction.” Raban said that Lowell often wrote bad first drafts of poems, drafts he would not tolerate when sane, but that they gave him the raw material for his poetry. He then assiduously revised the drafts when he was depressed. Lowell, Raban told me, had said to him on many occasions, “I write in mania and revise in depression.” When he was in the hospital, Raban visited and found him with “sheets and sheets of paper—writing at a furious rate.”
“In many ways,” Raban recalled, “the delusion of mania was so close to the mischievousness of invention which was his sanest side. The peak was a very narrow one.” Lowell, he continued, “was the most continuously metaphoric person I’ve ever met. Somebody who was incapable of seeing one object without wanting to fantasize it into another kind of object. His whole habit of thinking and feeling was metaphoric. In mania the metaphors took over.”
Lowell’s mind as one of constant metaphor was widely observed. “I have always felt that Cal stood at a different angle to experience than most people I’ve known,” said Esther Brooks. “Most of us, I believe, encounter something, then we feel it, and then we think about it. With Cal it would seem that whatever he encountered he thought about first, then he turned it into metaphor, and then he reached with feeling to that abstraction.” Brooks recounted the time that one of his stepchildren came to him shouting that her friend was stuck in a bog. “Cal didn’t move. Instead he looked around the room in anguish and said, with his outward prodding palm jabbing at the air, ‘We are all stuck in the bog. Nobody can help us. It’s impossible to help someone out of their bog when we can’t get out of our own bog.’ ” It took further screams and passing time before Lowell grasped the fact that the bog was real, not metaphor.
The great ambition that is so much a part of mania is also impervious to the usual checks on language; mania vaults over the rules of syntax and grammar. Much of what Lowell generated during mania was unusable; some of it, however, became the rough material for later and great poems.
Lowell wrote little poetry when he was depressed. He told psychiatrists that during his depression he was “unable to concentrate, was only interested in himself, and completely unable to write.” In 1949, when he was a patient at Payne Whitney, he told Dr. John Blitzer that he had renewed work on a poem that he had begun at the onset of his elated phase but was now “very depressed by how confused he had been writing the poetry.” He could write, he said, but he could not
concentrate nor make the kind of connections that came so easily to him when he was manic. If, however, he was only mildly depressed, he wrote to Peter Taylor, his “periodic de profundis” was “a spur to writing.”
When he was depressed, Lowell said, he went over his work, painstakingly, trying to understand it and trying to salvage what he could. Melancholic reflection could add something to art, he said; suffering was a muse of sorts. “Only out of pain is the art that can hide art,” he had said about the poetry of John Crowe Ransom. “Art demands the intelligent pain or care behind each speck of brick, each spot of paint.” Mood combines with memory in odd, contrary ways. Lowell ended Notebook (1970) by saying, “In truth I seem to have felt mostly the joys of living; in remembering, in recording, thanks to the gift of the Muse, it is the pain.” Memory was mutable; joy moved into pain, pain changed into joy. “On the great day, when the eyelid of life lifts— / why hide it? Joy has had the lion’s share.”
Depression did not transform Lowell’s work in the way that mania did. “Depression’s no gift from the Muse,” he once said. “At worst, I do nothing. But often I’ve written, and wrote one whole book—For the Union Dead—about witheredness. It wasn’t acute depression, and I felt quite able to work for hours, write and rewrite. Most of the best poems, the most personal, are gathered crumbs from the lost cake. I had better moods, but the book is lemony, soured and dry, the drouth I had touched with my own hands. That too may be poetry—on sufferance.” Depression isn’t danger, Lowell continued. “It’s not an accomplishment. I don’t think it a visitation of the angels but a weakening in the blood.”
Lowell rewrote ceaselessly, on occasion radically altering the meaning of individual words and entire poems. John Berryman recalled one poem that Lowell had first titled “To Jean,” which ended up as “To a Whore at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.” Charles Mingus ripped apart his jazz compositions and rebuilt them into something new. Lowell did likewise with his poems. Mutability in his language was as fundamental as the mutability in his moods. When Frank Bidart pointed out contradictory meanings in different versions of a poem, Lowell said, “But they both exist.” The draft of one poem, for example, read “the mania for phrases dried his heart.” In a subsequent version, it became “the mania for phrases enlarged his heart.” Contradictory, but they both exist. Most of the time he felt his poetry benefited from the reworking; occasionally he believed he had lost some of the original intensity of his writing in the process. “I took 14 poems from Notebook called ‘Long Summer,’ ” he said, which had been written about a summer in Maine with Elizabeth Hardwick and their daughter. The original poems were “dense, symbolic, almost hallucinated,” a “mixture of the style and mood behind it.” In his subsequent book History, he continued, “I calm them up, make them poems about boyhood in Maine. But the first version is much better.”
“I don’t believe I’ve ever written a poem in meter where I’ve kept a single one of the original lines,” Lowell said. He revised “endlessly”; sometimes there were as many as thirty versions of one poem. He “was revising something from the moment he got up until the moment he went to sleep,” observed Elizabeth Hardwick. Depression is a ruminative, highly self-critical state, ideal in its way for revising work generated in a spewing, generative, less self-censoring manic state. Depression prunes and edits. “I have observed that one mood is the natural critic of the other,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. This is true. Depression also corrects. Lowell’s passion for accuracy came in part from the corrective of depressive self-criticism; it came as well, Helen Vendler has suggested, from his understanding that “madness does not give an accurate sense of life.”
The extent and complexity of Lowell’s revising were legend. His friend Peter Taylor described the process in an interview: “One of the first things I noticed was his revision, his revision and revision and revision and you would see the poem written over in this sort of printed handwriting, over and over the same point with slight changes and then on each piece of paper, arrows and asterisks and changes—endless changes till finally the poem didn’t have the same, wasn’t the same poem at all, didn’t mean the same thing at all. I think that was the beginning of my learning that all things are equal in poetry, all the elements that go into making a poem and that including the theme, the theme is no more important than the form.”
Draft manuscript of “Epilogue”
Draft manuscript of “Epilogue” Credit 39
The drafts here of “Epilogue,” only a few of the many that went into the final poem in Lowell’s final book, show how to the end he painstakingly revised his work. The meaning, language, and form of the poem changed across its many drafts, not least in upending its title from “Preface” to “Epilogue.” The published version of the poem is given on this page. He brought, as one critic put it, a “grinding labor” to his raw genius.
Not a great deal of Lowell’s poetry is specifically about his mental illness; his work would not be of lasting literary importance if it were. But he wrote extraordinarily well about mania and depression, about madness. And his imagery—winds and tides that open this chapter, balloons and bubbles—reflect his preoccupation with moods and mutability. His poetic genius, together with his dispassion, his capacity to stand back and reimagine, make his poetry so powerful.
Bubbles, in Lowell’s language, foreshadow death and madness but they also bring hope, at times magic. “Lately, I’ve felt I was waking from a long dream,” Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop. “Fearful, hopeful, thrilled, a great weight pulling me backwards, a great air-bubble floating me upward, and somewhere a kind of birth in the substantial.” After Lowell died, a manuscript poem titled “Balloon” was found among his papers in England. It tells of the pull to rise, the illusion of freedom, a cold and final journey, and the debt owed for the flight:
It takes just a moment
for the string of the gas balloon
to tug itself loose from the hand.
If its string could only be caught in time
it could still be brought down
become once more a gay toy
safely tethered in the warm nursery world
of games, and tears, and routine.
But once let loose out of doors
being gas-filled the balloon can do nothing but rise
although the children who are left on the ground may cry
seeing it bobbing out of human reach.
On its long cold journey up to the sky
the lost balloon might seem to have the freedom of a bird.
But it can fly only as a slave
obeying the pull to rise which it cannot feel.
Having flown too high to have any more use as a plaything
who will care if it pays back its debt and explodes
returning its useless little pocket of air
to an uncaring air it has never been able to breathe.
Flight is precarious, whether it is the flight of a balloon, the imagination, or mania. Being suspended in air, with no assurance of ledge or foothold, is a central image in Lowell’s work. The toe is “skating the sheet for bedrock.” He writes in a poem, “I hang by a kitetail”; in another of awakening on the “window’s sloping ledge.” Lost in flight, he searches for a foothold but is left “in flight without a ledge.” In “Dropping South: Brazil,” he loses his “foothold on the map, / now falling, falling, bent, intense, my feet / breaking my clap of thunder on the street.” Ambition and defiance are like flight. “There is no foothold on your heights,” Prometheus warns, and is warned, in Lowell’s translation of Aeschylus. “You are already on your way down. Your fall will be hard, your fall will be soon.” And, at play’s end: “We’ve reached the end of the road, the topmost stone on the rooftop of the world. Beyond here, everything is downhill.” The ladder leads first to the moon, then down from it to earth and hell.
The possibility of falling, plummeting from a life of high mood and ideas, is integral to creative work. If there is enough imagination
, forcing together ideas and words and feeling may create something new. More usually it does not. Lowell knew this risk better than most. Innovation is uncertain. “When I finished Life Studies,” he said when he accepted the National Book Award in 1960, “I was left hanging on a question mark. I am still hanging there. I don’t know whether it is a death-rope or a life-line.” In a poem for Elizabeth Bishop about words suspended in air, he described the wait for the “unerring Muse”:
Have you seen an inchworm crawl on a leaf,
cling to the very end, revolve in air,
feeling for something to reach to something? Do
you still hang your words in air, ten years
unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps
or empties for the unimaginable phrase—
unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect?
Like Georges Cuvier and Henry Adams, Lowell believed that upheaval, the overthrow of the existing form and arrangement, changes earth and life forms in ways that gradual forces, the slow deposit of sediment, the steady flow of rivers, cannot. Upheavals in blood and brain were not so different in the life of man.
The psychological upheaval and intense infusions of high mood that preceded many of Lowell’s most innovative times of writing were usually associated with mania or the rise into mania. They were important; they stripped away stale ideas, generated new ones, and allowed him to create anew. Old lands need to be retilled, he wrote in an essay about Robert Frost. “Excellence had left the old poetry. Like the New England countryside, it had run through its soil and had been dead a long time.” Frost, he said, “rebuilt both the soil and the poetry.” So too did Wallace Stevens: “The subject throughout Stevens’s poems is the imagination, and its search for forms, myths, or metaphors….This is a threefold process: the stripping away of dead forms, the observation of naked reality, and the construction of new and more adequate forms.” New imaginative life for Lowell, new ordering of words and ideas, often came from upheaval and disturbance; imagination came from subterranean movement, storm, and hard action taken against established ways.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 34