Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character
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brought poetry into the Lowell line: Letter from Robert Lowell to Harriet Winslow, April 10, 1957, Houghton Library.
“some of his most productive months”: Marian Woolston, M.D., hospital record of Robert Lowell, Massachusetts Mental Health Center, December 21, 1957.
“The patient has had a series of breaks”: Ibid.
“but a huge amount of health”: “Poetry can come out of utterly miserable or disorderly lives, as in the case of a Rimbaud or a Hart Crane. But to make the poems possible a huge amount of health has to go into the misery.” Stanley Kunitz, “Talk with Robert Lowell,” New York Times Book Review, October 4, 1964, 34–38.
“there were no tickets”: Robert Lowell, “Beyond the Alps,” Collected Poems, 114.
“My trouble”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, March 30, 1959, Letters, 340.
“rock crystal”: Letter from Merrill Moore, M.D., to Charlotte Winslow Lowell, February 17, 1938, Robert Lowell Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (hereafter HRC). “We are dealing with a boy who has a personality like a rock crystal, glittering, very hard, and very definite in its formation.”
“Yet see—he mastereth himself”: George Gordon, Lord Byron, “Manfred,” act 2, scene 4, in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, vol. 4, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 86.
“We face the precariousness”: Robert Lowell, quoted in Jane Howard, “Applause for a Prize Poet,” Life, February 19, 1965, 56.
“We left feeling completely”: Alan Brownjohn, interview with Ian Hamilton, March 1981, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“Metaphor was his reality”: Esther Brooks, “Remembering Cal,” in Robert Lowell: A Tribute, ed. Rolando Anzilotti (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi Edition, 1979), 40.
“like a rather backward evolutionary form”: Helen Vendler, “Lowell in the Classroom,” The Harvard Advocate 113 (November 1979): 29.
“a man of genius”: Letter from Isaiah Berlin to Jacob Herzog, February 18, 1969, in Isaiah Berlin: Building; Letters 1960–1975, ed. Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle (London: Chatto & Windus, 2013), 367.
“so completely original”: Esther Brooks, “Remembering Cal,” 37–38.
“My impression is”: Robert Lowell, “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays on Me,” Salmagundi 37 (Spring 1977): 113.
“not always factually true”: Frederick Seidel, “The Art of Poetry: Robert Lowell,” Paris Review 7 (Winter–Spring 1961): 56–95.
“in which good poets are”: Robert Lowell letter to I. A. Richards, April 18, 1959, Letters, 346.
Hamilton’s biography of Lowell: Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982).
“Towards the end of the life”: Simon Gray, The Complete Smoking Diaries (London: Granta Books, 2013).
Paul Mariani’s biography: Paul Mariani, Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994).
“Robert Lowell was notably unlucky”: Richard Tillinghast, “The Achievement of Robert Lowell,” The New Criterion, January 2004.
“the book that broke the back”: Stewart Donovan, “Reading Robert Lowell,” Nashwaak Review 16–17 (Winter 2010).
“pitiless and strangely incomprehending”: Author interview with Jonathan Raban, June 20, 2012.
“missed his humor”: Author interview with Grey Gowrie, June 30, 2011, London.
Hardwick’s point: Others agreed with Hardwick. Derek Walcott, for one, disliked the relentless, negative focus on Lowell’s mental illness. Lowell was first and foremost “a great poet who had devastating bouts of mental illness. Clouds covered him, but when they went, he was extraordinarily gentle. He had that masculine sweetness that draws a deep love from men.” Derek Walcott, “On Robert Lowell,” New York Review of Books, March 1, 1984. Daniel Hoffman wrote, “A reader of Ian Hamilton’s biography could not imagine how enjoyable was his company, what fun he was to be with: witty, quick, courteous, unaffected. Hamilton’s informants told all about Lowell’s manic breakdowns but had not much to say of the charm that made writers like Peter Taylor and Randall Jarrell his life long friends.” Daniel Hoffman, “Afternoons with Robert Lowell,” London Magazine 32 (1992): 56.
“Every serious story”: Correspondence, Harriet Winslow Lowell to the author, April 2012.
2. THE ARCHANGEL LOVED HEIGHTS
“Timur saying something like”: Robert Lowell, “Fame,” Collected Poems, 449.
“All my life I have been eccentric”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Ezra Pound, May 2, 1936, Letters, 3–4.
“I wasn’t really afraid”: Frank Parker, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1980, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
he had begun to “understand God”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Richard Eberhart, July 10, 1935, Dartmouth College Library.
“Since then I have been”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Ezra Pound, May 2, 1936, Letters, 4.
“to bring back momentum”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Ezra Pound, n.d. May 1936, Letters, 6.
“He once said to me”: Frank Bidart, “Robert Lowell,” The Harvard Advocate 113 (November 1979): 12.
“twists of fire”: Robert Lowell, “Morning Blue,” Collected Poems, 657.
“The drop of water”: Robert Lowell, “Fame,” Collected Poems, 449.
“The Archangel loved heights”: Henry Adams, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904; New York: Penguin, 1986), 7.
“pour out more than the measure”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Harriet Winslow, September 17, 1956, Houghton Library.
“Give me a condor’s quill!”: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 465–66.
“Greatness, greatness, above all else”: Boris Pasternak, quoted in Guy de Mallac, Boris Pasternak: His Life and Art (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981), 336.
“habituated to the Vast”: Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Thomas Poole, October 16, 1797, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1, 1785–1800, ed. E. L. Briggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 91.
“excited by greatness”: Alfred Kazin, Alfred Kazin’s Journal, ed. Richard M. Cook (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 352–53.
“displays, in high degrees”: John Berryman, “Robert Lowell and Others,” in The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 286–87.
“Immense ambition”: Dana Gioia, correspondence with the author, July 2011.
“don’t settle down into the comfortably grand”: Frank Bidart, quoted in “Whatever Happened to Robert Lowell?,” Maine Sunday Telegram, August 3, 2003.
“There is undue preoccupation”: Marian Woolston, M.D., hospital record for Robert Lowell, Massachusetts Mental Health Center, December 1957.
Research bears this out: C. D. Spielberger, J. B. Parker, and J. Becker, “Conformity and Achievement in Remitted Manic-Depressive Patients,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases 137 (1963): 162–72; N. J. C. Andreasen and B. Pfohl, “Linguistic Analysis of Speech in Affective Disorders,” Archives of General Psychiatry 33 (1976): 1361–67; R. L. Leahy, “Decision Making and Mania,” Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy 13 (1999): 83–105; D. C. Fowles, “Biological Variables in Psychopathology,” in H. E. Adams and P. B. Sutker, eds., Comprehensive Handbook of Psychopathology, 3rd ed. (New York: Klumer, 2001), 85–104; B. E. Loranzo and S. L. Johnson, “Can Personality Traits Predict Increases in Manic and Depressive Symptoms?,” Journal of Affective Disorders 63 (2001): 103–11; S. L. Johnson, “Mania and Dysregulation in Goal Pursuit: A Review,” Clinical Psychology Review 25 (2005): 241–62; B. Meyer, C. G. Johnson, and E. Simmons, “Unique Association of Approach Motivation and Mania Vulnerability,” Cognition and Emotion 21 (2007): 1647–68; S. L. Johnson, C. S. Carver, and I. H. Gotlib, “Elevated Ambitions for Fame Among Persons with Bipolar I Disorder,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 121 (2012): 602–9.
“History lived in his nerves”: Derek Walcott, “On Robert Lowell.”
“gossiped about the English poets”: James Atlas, “Robert Lowell in Cambridge: Lord Weary,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1982, 56–64.
“of a life, a spirit”: Helen Vendler, “Lowell in the Classroom,” 22–29.
“Surfacing constantly in what Cal says”: Philip Booth, “Summers in Castine: Contact Prints, 1955–1965,” Salmagundi 37 (Spring 1977): 37–53.
“the great past, Revolutionary America”: John Thompson, “Two Poets,” 482–90.
“shuttle-like movements”: Elizabeth Stevenson, Henry Adams: A Biography (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 160.
“He was a survivor from another age”: Jonathan Raban, interview with the author, June 20, 2012.
“He could hold the world of archaic Rome”: Robert Fitzgerald, “Thinking of Robert Lowell: 1917–1977”, draft typescript, March 2, 1978, Robert Fitzgerald Papers, Yale University, YCAL mss. 222, box 57, folder 2124.
“I laid my hand on its skin”: Richard Stone, Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant (London: Fourth Estate, 2003), 15.
“Sometimes when I am trying”: Robert Lowell, “Hawthorne’s Pegasus,” Collected Prose, 162.
“The chief charm of New England”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (1907; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 7.
“our greatest man maybe”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Blair Clark, March 21, 1954, Letters, 225.
“born under the shadow of the Dome”: Robert Lowell, “Antebellum Boston,” Collected Prose, 291.
“a cold that froze the blood”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 7.
Summer, on the other hand: Ibid., 8.
“effort to live”: Ibid.
“It ran through life”: Ibid., 9.
“menaced” and “knowingly sensuous mind”: Robert Lowell, “New England and Further,” Collected Prose, 201.
“Adams’ connection with Boston”: Robert Lowell, “Henry Adams 1850,” Collected Poems, 484.
“a world I knew mostly from summer”: Robert Lowell, “Robert Frost,” Collected Prose, 9.
“What a heavy way of saying”: Letter from Robert Lowell to George Santayana, February 1, 1951, Letters, 167.
“I find that I fall into two parts”: Robert Lowell to Vernon Williams, M.D., n.d. mid-1950s, HRC.
“sober prudence”: R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: Harcourt Brace, 1926), 212.
“The lightning which explodes”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate,” in The Conduct of Life (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1860).
“the greatest nonfiction writer”: Robert Lowell, “New England and Further,” Collected Prose, 186.
“he loves the contrast”: Jonathan Miller, BBC program, “The Lively Arts: Robert Lowell,” March 9, 1965.
“the Puritanical iron hand”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, March 30, 1959, Letters, 340.
“Maybe it’s just my nature”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, January 24, 1964, Letters, 441.
“During this time I have had”: Letter to Chard Powers Smith, October 3, 1959, Letters, 354.
“Lights and shadows”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, May 19, 1840, American Notebooks, Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Claude Simpson, vol. 8 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972).
“For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight”: Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” The Literary World, August 17 and 24, 1850.
“Lowell had the most disconcerting mixture”: Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (New York: New American Library, 1968), 53–54.
“From the time I first knew him”: Peter Taylor, “Robert Trail [sic] Spence Lowell 1917–1977,” Ploughshares 5 (1979): 74–81.
“the accomplishments of man”: Robert Lowell, “The Iliad,” Collected Prose, 150.
“He would be a writer”: Francis Parker, “Brentwood Camp,” The Harvard Advocate 113 (November 1979): 8.
“quite dreadful tensions”: Blair Clark, “On Robert Lowell,” The Harvard Advocate, 113 (November 1979): 9–10.
“unreasoning hate of Achilles cannot continue”: Robert Lowell, “The Iliad,” Collected Prose, 150.
The hero’s punishment: Ibid., 149.
“wavering, irresistible force”: Robert Lowell, “Epics,” Collected Prose, 214.
“Anger be now your song”: Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 5.
“Sing, goddess, the anger”: Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 75.
“Rage—Goddess, sing the rage”: Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), 77.
“Achilles’ baneful wrath”: Homer, The Iliad, trans. George Chapman (1614–16; London: J. R. Smith, 1857).
“Sing for me, Muse”: Robert Lowell, “The Killing of Lykaon,” Collected Poems, 197.
“Over non-existence”: Robert Lowell, “Pigeons,” Collected Poems, 316.
II. ORIGINS: THE PURITANICAL IRON HAND OF CONSTRAINT
“My trouble seems”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, March 30, 1959, Letters, 340.
3. SANDS OF THE UNKNOWN
“Robert Lowell, Poet”: Citation for honorary degree, doctor of letters, conferred upon Robert Lowell by Yale University, June 1968.
“I wrote about only four places”: Ian Hamilton, “A Conversation with Robert Lowell,” The Review 26 (Summer 1971): 10.
“I come with signposts”: Robert Lowell, “1916, Manuscript, Antebellum Boston” (ca. 1955), Robert Lowell Papers, Houghton Library, 2209.
“If you had come out of”: Ibid.
“To my children”: Quoted in C. R. Hayward, G. A. Packard, and W. H. Coburn, “Arthur Winslow, M.I.T. 1881,” tribute of the Alumni Council of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, n.d., HRC. The passage from Winslow’s will was also published in the Boston Globe; “Boston Engineer Wills Life in N. E. to Children.”
“He was my Father”: Robert Lowell, “Dunbarton,” Collected Poems, 168.
“This room was brighter then”: Robert Lowell, “Phillips House Revisited,” Collected Poems, 798.
“Charles River to the Acheron”: Robert Lowell, “In Memory of Arthur Winslow,” Collected Poems, 23.
“raked leaves from our dead forebears”: Robert Lowell, “Dunbarton,” Collected Poems, 169.
“It was in the stars”: Robert Lowell, “New England and Beyond,” Collected Prose, 183.
“We New Englanders”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Anthony Ostroff, August 23, 1957, Letters, 290.
“something of the mind”: Robert Lowell, “New England and Further,” Collected Prose, 181.
“is not down on any map”: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851; New York: Penguin, 2003), 61.
“thousand small town New England”: Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead,” Collected Poems, 377.
“a kind of carnal gravity”: Robert Lowell, “New England and Further,” Collected Prose, 180.
“with open arms, joy”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, February 26, 1967, Letters, 484.
“Everything in the geologist’s mind”: Adam Nicolson, Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides (New York: North Point Press, 2002), 80–81.
“think always of how it came to be”: Ibid., 81.
“Ours was an old family”: Ian Hamilton, “A Conversation with Robert Lowell,” 10–29.
“I woke up the other morning”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Harriet Winslow, July 31, 1961, Letters, 385.
“feed off history”: Jonathan Miller, BBC program, “The Lively Arts: Robert Lowell,” March 9, 1965.
“In different hours”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate,” Nature and Selected Essays (1860; New York: Penguin, 2003), 366.
“What is history?”: Robert Lowell, “Mexico,” Collected Poems, 625.
“dynastic as well as an artistic”: Seamus Heaney, “On Robert Lowell,” a memorial address given at St. Luke’s Church, Red
cliffe Square, London, October 5, 1977, New York Review of Books, February 9, 1978.
“I had a little ancestor”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Harriet Winslow, February 13, 1956, Letters, 254.
“A lot is lost”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Harriet Winslow, March 8, 1956, Houghton Library.
“They come back sometimes”: Robert Lowell, “Revenants,” Collected Poems, 494.
“an hereditary depravity”: John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 1, Library of Christian Classics, vol. 20, trans. F. L. Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 251.
“positive energy of this sin”: Ibid.
“I feel more warmth for Hawthorne”: Robert Lowell, “New England and Further,” Collected Prose, 188–91.
“How comes it you have”: Letter from George Hillard to Nathaniel Hawthorne, March 28, 1850, cited in Edwin Haviland Miller, Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 8.
“He was earnest as a priest”: Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Memories of Hawthorne (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897).
“The spirit of my Puritan ancestors”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks: 1853–1856 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997), 193.
“It is now nearly two centuries”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 9–10.
“The wrong-doing of one generation”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851; New York: Bantam, 1981), vii.
“might be drawn”: Ibid., 2.
“As a man-of-war that sails”: Herman Melville, White–Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War (1850; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 402–3.
“I never thought it an abatement”: James Russell Lowell, “New England Two Centuries Ago,” The Writings of James Russell Lowell, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1892), 21.
“I know of no other thinker”: Eulogy for Nathaniel Hawthorne given by the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, March 23, 1864, reported in the Boston Evening Transcript, May 24, 1864.
“It was then”: Robert Lowell, “New England and Further,” Collected Prose, 190.
“Hawthorne died depressed”: Ibid.