The man who believes his life should be hazarded, wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, “makes a very different acquaintance of the world, keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he runs.” Such a man “may shoot up and become a constellation in the end.”
Fire like upheaval cleared the path to new ways of thinking; Lowell used the image often, from his first book of poems to his last. Fire could obliterate the dead brush and rot. But it could obliterate life as well. He had taken, he said in “Reading Myself,” “just pride and more than just, / struck matches that brought my blood to a boil; /…memorized the tricks to set the river on fire.” “The fires men build live after them,” he wrote elsewhere; “this night, this night, I elfin, I stonefoot, / walking the wildfire.” “Fire will be the first absolute power,” said Prometheus, the fire bringer. “It will be the last to rule. I am burning in my own fire.” When a whale is rendered, its blubber is used to feed the flame. “Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope,” wrote Herman Melville, “once ignited, the whale supplies its own fuel and burns by its own body.” Its smoke, wild and hellish, “smells like the left wing of the day of judgment.”
Fire and fever were forces that Lowell knew well; he recognized and respected them in the incendiary states of his mind, recognized their danger and believed in their possibilities. Fever and madness scorch, clear, and incite the brains they inhabit. “For aught we know to the contrary,” William James had written in The Varieties of Religious Experience, “103° or 104° Fahrenheit might be a much more favorable temperature for truths to germinate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees.” Lowell’s imagination was testament to this; he described his ill blood, high blood, and fire blood and wrote about the fever that convulsed his mind. In literature “it is only the wild that attracts us,” wrote Thoreau. It is not the polished and refined, it is the untamed and uncivilized that pierce our armor, find the heart. It is the “wild thinking in Hamlet, in the Iliad, and all the scriptures and mythologies that delight us.” Lowell, more than a hundred years later, would contrast “cooked” poetry—“marvelously expert” and “laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar”—with “raw” poetry, “huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience…dished up for midnight listeners.”
Blood brought life at its highest energy; it brought it at its most diseased. “My mind’s not right…,” he says in “Skunk Hour,” in his great description of despair. “I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, / as if my hand were at its throat…./ I myself am hell; / nobody’s here.”
In “High Blood,” Lowell describes his exultant days of mania, the mad pounding of his blood’s live flow, the high blood that fires up the tyrant and the tyrannized:
I watch my blood pumped into crystal pipes,
red sticks like ladycrackers for a child—
nine-tenths of me, and yet it’s lousy stuff.
Touched, it stains, slips, drips, sticks; and it’s lukewarm.
All else—the brains, the bones, the stones, the soul—
is peripheral flotsam on this live flow.
On my great days of sickness, I was God;
and now I might be. I catpad on my blood,
and the universe moves beneath me when I move.
It’s the aorta and heartbeat of my life;
hard rock turned high, chosen record purring,
as if the sapphire in the cat were stuck—
cry of high blood for blood that gives both tyrant
and tyrannized their short half-holiday.
A revised version of the poem, “For Ann Adden 4. Coda,” carries the same lines of high blood and life blood, tyrants and tyrannized, but in it Lowell also describes his nightmare days as God, the “great days of sickness.” Even on the steadiest day, he wrote, “I have to brace my hand against a wall / to keep myself from swaying—swaying wall, / straitjacket, hypodermic, helmeted / doctors, one crowd, white-smocked, in panic, hit, / and bury me running on the cleated field.” Yet he longs to hold on to the gentler side of high blood. In “While Hearing the Archduke Trio,” he writes of the mood he hopes to keep, the one he felt listening to Beethoven, evocative, beautiful: “I so pray this pretty sky to stay: / my high blood, fireclouds, the first dew, / elms black on the moon.”
“Stable equilibrium is death,” proclaimed Henry Adams. This was bedrock for Lowell. “Life by definition breeds on change,” he wrote. After each new book of poems he was driven to move on from it, try a different way; forge a new style; grow. This desire and capacity to innovate created a greatly varied body of work, a life arc of work, one that changed from the baroque, knotted, violent intensity of Lord Weary’s Castle to the more personal, direct language of Life Studies and then beyond. Lowell’s innovations in poetic style define periods or epochs of his work; this capacity to change has been remarked upon time and again by critics and by other poets.
Al Alvarez wrote in 1965 that “each book of Lowell’s seems, to an extraordinary degree, complete and resolved in itself. Then the next one appears and goes so unexpectedly far beyond the last that you have to revise your demands. He has, in short, a genius for constantly setting and then raising the standards by which his own work is to be judged.” The poet Donald Hall wrote that Lowell was “not the first poet to undertake great change in midcareer, but he was the best poet to change so much.” Randall Jarrell believed that Lowell was “a poet of great originality and power who has, extraordinarily, developed instead of repeating himself.”
More recently, the critic A. O. Scott tied Lowell’s art to the sweep of his artistic ambition and to his capacity to write and think in epic terms. “To read Lowell in sequence,” he wrote, “is to discover that he was indeed a supreme maker—not just of individual lyrics, but of sequences, of books…and, above all, of his own biography….[Lowell’s Collected Poems] is a big, sprawling novel, the narrative of a career, an epic story of literary ambition. Which means, given the poet and the times, that it is a story about both the eclipse and the apotheosis of such ambition.” Adam Kirsch also speaks of Lowell’s sweep of imagination and creative boldness: “There is an art of restraint and witness,” he writes in The Wounded Surgeon, “which many poets of the late twentieth century found to be the appropriate response to their time. But Lowell’s art is one of power and grandeur, assertion and transformation. It is this that makes him the natural heir and companion to the classic English poets, starting with his beloved Milton; it is this that gave him the confidence to write so magnificently in so many different styles.”
When Lowell wrote about audacity in Prometheus Bound he could have been speaking of himself. “I was guided by the great gods of that day, their most powerful flashes, and later by the steady light of my own mind. That mind was in no way walled in or useless. Each thought was like a finger touching, tampering, testing, and trying to give things a little of my bias to alter and advance. I never felt bound to keep anything to its original custom, place or purpose. I turned the creatures on their heads, and lifted the doors from the hinges of determination.”
From the start of his creative life to its end, Lowell lifted the doors from the hinges of determination. It would have been easier to stay with the way he had written before, and what he knew he could do. As early as 1951, just a few years after he had won the Pulitzer Prize for Lord Weary’s Castle, he said, “It’s been tough getting down to writing.” He wavered, he said, “between a desire not to repeat, and the void and formlessness of what I haven’t tried.” A year later he felt he had made progress. “I think I am going into new country, and will not be repeating my old tricks; at least I’m full of stuff I had no notion of saying before.” Still, it was difficult to come up with a new way to write. “It’s hell finding a new style, or rather finding that your old style won’t say any of the things you want to, and that you can’t write it if you try, and yet that petrified flotsam-bits of it are always bobbing up when you don�
��t want them.”
Lowell’s discontent with his work; his determination to change it, to expand the territory; his will to keep at it until he did define artists who change the face of art for those who follow. “It’s only possible by being usually impossible. I want to do all the things I can’t do now,” he wrote during his run-up to the historic break in style he developed for Life Studies. “The game is to push and not be carried by this old jungle of used equipment.”
His new poems, he wrote to Robert Frost, “seem to me a gift of the muse…for me they breathe, seem engagingly put together. And yet, and yet!” Already he was dissatisfied. His new work was too fierce, he said, too personal. “The direction rather appalls me,” he continued. “Such a narrow fierceness, so many barbed quills hung with bits of skin.” He was set on taking his work in a new direction. He had replaced the “old stuff” (Lord Weary’s Castle), which now seemed to him “like something from the ancient extinct age of the reptiles, cumbersome creatures, bogged down and destroyed by their protective hide,” with the autobiographical poems of Life Studies. It wasn’t enough. “Now the need to be impersonal has come again, with it a need for some third style, still unfound.”
As he had in the years leading up to Life Studies, Lowell went through extended fallow times, searching for new ways to shape form and content. “One wants a whole new deck of cards to play with, or at least new rules for the old ones,” he wrote to Randall Jarrell at the beginning of 1960. He needed to strip away the old to allow in the new: “Time to grub up and junk the year’s / output, a dead wood of dry verse: / dim confession, coy revelation, / liftings, listless self-imitation.” As a child, Lowell had kept snakes; like them, he shed and grew and shed again. In 1970 he wrote to Elizabeth Hardwick that he had been writing new poems at a furious rate; it was, again, “a new tune, a new meter, a new me.” The world “owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease,” wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne. “The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.”
Readers exert a pull on writers to stay within a different kind of limit. The history of literature, Pasternak said, “shows that every poet has different generations of readers who accept one but not another period in his work.” A writer must “have the courage to disregard the tasks of his admirers, to fly in the face of their instinctive desire to force him to go on repeating himself.”
The pattern of restlessness and discontent, the determination to innovate and not to rest on past accomplishment continued to Lowell’s death. In 1976, not long before he sent off his final volume of poems to his publisher, he wrote again to Elizabeth Hardwick. He expressed his dissatisfaction with his new poems but said that his mind simmered yet. “Man is never happy,” he wrote. “I have been chronically complaining about overconcentration on work, both because of what it does to one, how it distracts one, and because I feel afraid of a certain stylistic callousness, plough-pushing if there’s such archaic idiom. Now on the verge of mailing off my new book…I feel in this ebb of the European heatwave, as if all the grass has been burned off the view. Pause and be wise; but the machine goes on clanking in the head.” When he died a year later he was carrying a briefcase; within it was a notebook filled with poems and fragments of poems. He was creating to the end.
At a literary symposium dedicated to his work, Lowell summed up the living, evolving quality of creative work. He said he believed his poetry to be a “continuing story—still wayfaring. A story of what? Not the ‘growth of a poet’s mind.’ Not a lesson and example to be handed to the student. Yet the mind must eventually age and grow, or the story would be a still life, the pilgrimage of a zombie.” “My journey,” he told the audience, “is always stumbling on the unforeseen and even unforeseeable.” It was also, and always, about ambition and his place in history, about breaking free. Frank Bidart quotes Lowell’s opening line, “O to break loose,” that opens “Waking Early Sunday Morning”; it is, as he says, a line filled with promise, energy, desire, and limit. It is a line of ambition, a poem of ambition. It is a poem that goes from life-spewing, ecstatic leap—
O to break loose, like the Chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
—to the depleted, to a “[f]ierce, fireless mind, running downhill.” It ends with desolate lines about war and corruption of the state, lines that knell man and planet. “Waking Early,” Lowell wrote to a reader, is a poem “about energy,” “too much and too little energy.” “Both conditions were dangerous,” he continued. A “sort of non-clinical manic-depressive state, resembling the world and the American national character, mine too.”
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life…
Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war—until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.
“In the years I knew Lowell,” writes Frank Bidart, “the growing, live enterprise of his work seemed itself to be a breaking loose from the past, to be part of an arc that no one—perhaps not even Lowell himself—could change or deflect. He said to me a number of times that he couldn’t write in the styles he had used in the past….What I have always found hard to talk about is the constant sense I had, in the years Lowell was producing new poem after new poem, of the enormous fundamental seriousness, the range and intellectual ambition animating his enterprise. That it was an enterprise.”
Lowell’s legacy is to poetry, but through his writing he also made the experience of madness and depression more real, more human; he made the suffering that comes with them less easy to close one’s eyes to. He wrote about what he knew and he put his blood and genius into it.
Lowell’s view of mental illness was not a romantic one. It was clear-eyed and understated. The best poems, he said, have compassion and are made of iron. This is how he wrote about mania and depression and about the experience of being committed to mental hospitals. His poems do not dramatize; rather, they reflect Graham Greene’s view that “when one is dealing with horrors one should write very coldly.” Much of what has been written about mental illness has been written too close to the throes of breakdown, too close to the bone to carry the full horror of experience; it has given idiosyncratic accounts rather than art. Raw experience, unless incubated in memory and coupled with great gift, may be heartfelt but does not necessarily lend itself to the kind of portrayal to render it part of the greater human condition.
“Memory is not an end but an invaluable means for selecting and accumulating,” wrote Lowell, “for holding an experience as in a pair of tongs so that the intellect many intuit from many angles, distort, refine, invent and develop etc.” Lowell, in his poetry, prose, and letters, gave lucid, often wrenching accounts of mania, depression, and his mental illness. But he held his experiences in a pair of tongs before he published his work. He wrote frequently about mania, what he often referred to as pathological enthusiasm. Mania was variously “a ladder to the moon,” “a magical orange grove in a nightmare,” a “fine puff of madness,” “a gruesome, vulgar, blasting surge of enthusiasm,” a “holocaust of irrationality,” a “violent seizure.” It was a “rage monstrous, causeless,” a time when one was “tireless, madly sanguine, menaced, and menacing.”
Lowell described the euphoria and confidence that the early stages of mania gave him and, like most who have been manic, he delighted in it. The world was “full of wonders” and “rather tremendous experiences.” It was “PARADISE!,” a time of throbbing “hyperenthusiasm.” He knew, however, that soon the tide would go out; wariness was required. Too much happiness was the harbinger of madness. “The state of happiness is wrong,” he said
. “We are dangerously happy.” “I grow too merry.” “No voice outsings the serpent’s / flawed, euphoric hiss,” he wrote in “Paradise Regained: June at McLean’s Hospital.” The glory of mania veered into violence and banality; pathological enthusiasm flipped into madness. Mania corrupted and disabled. “I can’t see myself,” he said. “I have stood too long on a chair or ladder, / branch-lightning forking through my thought and veins.”
The rising madness was dangerous, isolating, inhuman:
Sometimes, my mind is a rocked and dangerous bell;
I climb the spiral stairs to my own music,
each step more poignantly oracular,
something inhuman always rising in me.
After the fever of mania had run its course, bringing with it infidelity, mayhem, the police, and straitjacket, he climbed down his ladder from the moon: “our hallucinator, the disenchantress”; the “gadabout with heart of chalk, unnamable / void and cold thing in the universe, / lunatic’s pill with poisonous side-effects.” Climbing up, backing down the ladder to the moon, was Lowell’s common metaphor for his ascent and plummets from mania. Always he knew the damage he had done, the toll taken on his relationships and his reputation. He told Elizabeth Bishop that he had acted with “abysmal myopia and lack of consideration”; his disease had given him “a headless heart.” Mania was “bluster and antics,” “windy utterances, domestic chaos.” How often, he wrote, “have my antics / and insupportable, trespassing tongue / gone astray.”
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 35