Given the relish these days for scandalous life over honorable art, it should come as no surprise that Ian Hamilton's biography of the American poet Robert Lowell has attracted far more attention than any of the poet's books ever did. Considering the space that has been granted to this book by the sundry publications that normally act as if poetry, like some species of dinosaur, does not exist, we are confronted once again with the priorities of the reading public. Poetry is simply not read, at least not nearly as often as the story of a poet's life, even if the poetry contains, as many of Lowell's “confessional” works did, some dark facts about the poet's life. The biography Robert Lowell has even inspired Faber & Faber, the serious English publisher who brought out the book recently in England, to adorn the firm's outgoing mail with little pictures of Lowell's countenance, neatly printed by the machine that applies the postage. The words beneath the face read: “The literary biography of the year. Illustrated.”

In a certain sense, all this attention has not been wasted. Robert Lowell was the premier American poet of a highly talented generation whose members included John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Theodore Roethke. He was, for a good part of his career at least, a brilliant technician whose best poetry, unlike that of some of his notable contemporaries, is as powerful today as the day it was written. At the same time, Lowell was a lifelong mental patient who suffered—and made others suffer—greatly. If we add to this his impeccable American pedigree, his rather overwhelming good looks, and his numerous love affairs, there is more than enough appeal for any number of gossips and intellectual groupies who have never cracked the binding of any of his books. Biographers do not, as a matter of course, concentrate on the details of the life so much that the intellectual concerns of the poet and man of letters are obscured. But in the case of Lowell, there is such an array of indelicate and unseemly facts—as Ian Hamilton makes abundantly clear—that little practical chance exists for the work (and the sensibility and rich culture that produced it) to get its proper due. This is unfortunate, for Lowell was a paramount figure in American culture, and we desperately need an intellectual biography of him. For the time being, we must apparently settle for a good deal of dirty linen.

Let us consider some of the events of Lowell's life as Hamilton has chronicled them. Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Jr., was born into considerable privilege in Boston in 1917. His father, a career naval officer named Robert Lowell, had as an ancestor James Russell Lowell, the eminent New England poet. His mother was Charlotte Winslow, the descendant of a distinguished Boston family. Her father, says Hamilton, was “ridiculously proud” of the fact that his forebears had supported George III. Scornful of his deeply ineffectual father and fearful and perplexed by his overbearing mother (after a row one night with her husband, Charlotte hugged her small son and declared, “Oh Bobby, it's such a comfort to have a man in the house”), the young Lowell developed into something of a bully. At St. Mark's School, he was frequently involved in scraps with schoolmates. He also collected soldiers, read military history, and wrote an essay called “War: A Justification.” His general deportment at St. Mark's earned him the nickname “Cal,” after either Caliban or Caligula. He lorded over a small circle of friends with, in Hamilton's words, a “brutal, childish” tyranny. Two of them, Blair Clark and Francis Parker, would admirably stick by Lowell throughout his life. Lowell did not do well academically at St. Mark's, but did come in contact with the poet Richard Eberhart, who was teaching there at the time.

It was while Lowell was a freshman at Harvard that he decided to become a poet. He was determined to let nothing deter him, least of all Harvard, which he left after one year. (Robert Frost, the Norton Lecturer during the year Lowell was there, reacted coolly to the young poet's work.) He chose his first girl friend—a recent debutante named Ann Dick—because of her willingness to become, as Hamilton relates, “a new, and utterly devout, disciple.” Dinners at her family's home were occasions for Lowell to recite Milton, Shakespeare, and Donne. The relationship also provided Lowell with the opportunity to clash once again with his father. Mr. Lowell, it seems, had written a letter to Ann Dick's father suggesting improper behavior between the two young adults, with the further suggestion that they stop seeing one another. Upon learning of this letter, Cal returned home and knocked his father down.

Merrill Moore, the psychiatrist who at this point intervened, suggested that Lowell move to Vanderbilt University where a friend of Moore's, Allen Tate, was then teaching. The eager novitiate poet quickly became a member of Tate's household. Lowell began writing his first experiments in poetry on the Tate model—“organized hard and classical,” as Lowell said. Then, after a year at Vanderbilt, he moved to Kenyon College in 1937 to study with John Crowe Ransom. It was here that Lowell met Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, and Robie Macauley. Earlier in the same year he had met another writer, Jean Stafford, at a conference he attended with Tate. In the spring of 1940, Lowell and Stafford were married. A few weeks later Lowell was graduated from Kenyon, the valedictorian of his class.

Between the brief time spent at Louisiana State University as a graduate student (studying with Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren) and his move to New York City the following year, Lowell became a Catholic. He forced Stafford, who had converted a few years earlier herself (but had recently lapsed), through a second, Catholic, marriage ceremony. The couple celebrated mass in the morning, benediction in the evening, and two rosaries a day. A Jesuit priest called Lowell “more Catholic than the Church.” This assault on the Lowell-Winslow lineage—religion as war by other means—was not the same as striking his father, but it must have been even more painful.

As part of Lowell's new commitment to Catholicism, he refused to be drafted during the war. He put forth his objections to the Allied bombing of German civilians in a telegram to President Roosevelt. As Lowell would later say in a draft of the poem “Memories of West Street and Lepke” (from Life Studies), “My conscientious objector statement meant to blow the lid off / the United States Roosevelt and my parents.” While Lowell was serving a prison sentence of a year and a day, Charlotte Lowell blamed the entire unhappy episode on the Tates, who, she claimed, had encouraged in her son “the emotional excitement of poetry.”

The “retributive gusto,” as Ian Hamilton calls it, of Lowell's Catholicism inspired the poems in his first book, Land of Unlikeliness, published by the Cummington Press in 1944. Hamilton sees in the poems “a high fever, a driven, almost deranged belligerence in both the voice and the vocabulary, as if poems had become hurled thunderbolts, instruments of grisly retribution.” But Allen Tate's description of the character of the poems in his introduction to the volume includes an uncanny prophecy about the future course of Lowell's career. Tate wrote:

On the one hand, the Christian symbolism is intellectualized and given a savage satirical direction; it points to the disappearance of the Christian experience from the modern world, and stands, perhaps, for the poet's own effort to recover it. On the other hand, certain shorter poems, like “A Suicidal Nightmare” and “Death from Cancer,” are richer in immediate experience than the explicitly religious poems; they are more dramatic, the references being personal and historical and the symbolism less willed and explicit.

“Intellectualized” versus “immediate”: Lowell's movement between these two poles will, as we shall see, become a permanent feature of his poetic career and, indeed, of his life.

Meanwhile, the Lowells' marriage, which, as Jean Stafford jokingly put it, had suffered from a diet of “too many iambs,” ended. The real reason, however, was Lowell's having fallen in love with Gertrude Buckman, Delmore Schwartz's first wife. But “falling in love,” in this case, was actually a symptom of the first stage of the dreaded manic-depressive cycle that now set in and would haunt Lowell to the end of his life. Each time the chronology of symptoms was exactly, horrifyingly, the same: an emotional winding up, an ecstatic flight from his present surroundings for a “new life” (the words Lowell himself repeatedly used), usually with the nearest available woman, a violent climax, and a denouement of straitjackets, padded cells, and, at least in the early years, shock treatment.

Lowell's second book, Lord Weary's Castle, appeared in 1946. After seeing the manuscript, Randall Jarrell wrote to Lowell, “You write more in the great tradition, the grand style, the real middle of English poetry, than anybody since Yeats.” The book won a Pulitzer Prize and brought him an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award and a Guggenheim. The reviews glowed with the highest possible praise. There was reason for this clamor. Lowell's new work is more supple, more deft and ironic, than his previous work. The cascade of alliteration, allusion, and imagery in the poems in Lord Weary's Castle is held together by a firmly knit iambic pentameter line. But Lowell's determination to explore the paradoxes of Protestant America's past, using the searchlight of his new religion, reaches an almost mad level of intensity. The subject of his New England ancestry, which he will return to again and again (though in different forms), is at once full of rich particularity and deep philosophical resonances. Meanwhile a Boston Globe headline proclaimed: THE MOST PROMISING POET IN 100 YEARS … MAY BE GREATER THAN JAMES AND AMY? Reacting to the achievement of his twenty-nine-year-old son, Lowell's father remarked: “Poets seem to see more in his work than most other people.”

In 1948 Lowell met the novelist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick at Yaddo, the writer's colony; they were married a year later. Following the death of Lowell's father in 1950, the couple moved to Italy. In 1951 Lowell published The Mills of the Kavanaughs. The book consists of a number of shorter poems and the 608-line title poem. In the marvelously successful shorter poems, such as “Falling Asleep Over the Aeneid” and “Mother Marie Therese,” Lowell again plumbs the depths of history and poetic tradition. And the remarkable Lowell rhythms, which are like no one else's, are again metrically well contained, this time by heroic couplets. But the long title poem, about a woman lamenting her absent husband, was considered by most critics a colossal failure. Lowell's attempt to conflate a large, symbolic, historically impressive structure and highly personal subject matter resulted, according to its critics, in a forced symbolism and a paralyzed story line. In other words, Lowell was stylistically stuck between the two poles in Tate's prophecy: the intellectualized and the immediate. Even Lowell's friend Randall Jarrell had to admit that the poem's “people too often seem to be acting in the manner of Robert Lowell, rather than plausibly.”

But even more disturbing—and, in the end, influential—critical observations were put forth by William Carlos Williams in his review of The Mills in the New York Times Book Review. America's doyen of free verse chided Lowell for the “formal fixation of the line” and the “rhyme-track.” Lowell, said Williams,

appears to be restrained by the lines; he appears to want to break them. And when the break comes, tentatively, it is toward some happy recollection, the tragedy intervening when this is snatched away and the lines close in once more.

A year earlier Williams had called Lowell a “tiger” behind the “bars” of rhyme (the zoo, in this case, being traditional verse forms). “More and more,” writes Hamilton, “Lowell was inclined to learn from Williams.” Lowell, in a letter to Williams, stated as much himself: “Still I wish rather in vain that I could absorb something of your way of writing into mine.”

The critical failure of The Mills deeply affected Lowell—so much so that he wrote little poetry during the next few years. He seemed to be rethinking his whole approach to his craft. After his mother's death in 1954, Lowell left Italy for Marlborough Street in Boston, very near the house in which he spent his childhood. During a short teaching stint at the University of Cincinnati, Lowell delivered a most curious lecture on Hitler, “more or less extolling the superhuman ideology,” in Hamilton's words. In fact, Lowell was “speeding up” again, and shortly after this incident he had a severe breakdown. As part of his therapy, Lowell was given, for the first time, a new drug called Thorazine. Hamilton reports that the drug's side effects make its takers appear “sluggish, dazed, somnambulistic.”

Given this clinical fact, it is scarcely surprising that Lowell was unable to complete many poems during this period in his life. But he does undertake, as part of his new therapy, a prose autobiography. In the generous selections Hamilton makes available (Lowell's draft remains unpublished), we see a noticeably “looser” Lowell discussing, in the most raw and “immediate” style he has yet achieved, the devastating experience of mental illness.

I began to talk aimlessly and loudly to the room at large. I discussed the solution to a problem that had been bothering me about the unmanly smallness of the suits of armor that I had seen “tilting” at the Metropolitan Museum. “Don't you see?” I said, and pointed to Anna, “the armor was made for Amazons!” But no one took up my lead. … Nobody paid any attention to me.

It is difficult to say with certainty how much Lowell's new “aesthetic,” as evidenced in this excerpt from the draft autobiography, was abetted by Thorazine. Whatever the case, in March 1957 (two years after starting work on the autobiography) Lowell had developed, in his own words, a further “disrespect for tight forms. If you could make it easier by just changing the syllables, then why not?” Following a reading trip to the West Coast, where he encountered the beat poets who were pursuing ideas very similar to his, Lowell began work on new poems. By October he finished eleven of them, “turned into free verse,” Hamilton relates, “from a first draft in couplets.” Lowell sent the new work to his new mentor, William Carlos Williams, with a letter in which he stated: “I see I forget to say that I feel more and more technically indebted to you, growing young in my forties!” Lowell also sent the manuscript to Allen Tate. Now clearly repudiated, Tate wrote back:

All the poems about your family, including the one about you and Elizabeth, are definitely bad … the poems are composed of unassimilated details, terribly intimate, and coldly noted, which might well have been transferred from the notes from your autobiography without change.

The free verse, arbitrary and without rhythm, reflects this lack of imaginative focus.

Tate even wondered if the new poems were the prelude to another manic spell. He turned out to be right. A few days later Lowell was admitted to the Boston Psychopathic Hospital.

Life Studies, the book in which this new work appeared, was published in 1959. Lowell focused his new “terribly intimate” eye on, among other things, his (evidently) difficult marriage, his father (“91 Revere Street” is about knocking him down), and the literary figures he felt close to at the time. Lowell's coldness, as Tate put it, often reads more like a form of emotional deadness. As for the free verse, there is little question that it is “arbitrary,” to use one of Tate's words again, but at the same time it never strikes us as purely undigested or lacking in concentration. And as much as Lowell bemoaned, in another letter to Williams, “the apparatus of logic and conceit and even set subjects,” he by no means gave up entirely on any of these. What was gone forever was the grand Miltonic style Lowell had achieved in Lord Weary's Castle. “You speak more to us,” Williams assured Lowell.

The high praise that greeted Life Studies must have finally convinced Lowell that he was on the right track. As the decade of the sixties began, the Lowells decided to view the proceedings from the vantage point of Sixty-seventh Street in New York City rather than that of Marlborough Street in Boston. They moved, with their three-year-old daughter, Harriet, in 1961. But the “wild electric beauty” of New York provided no haven for Lowell's sickness. During the next two years Lowell was wracked by more mental episodes, and he left Hardwick for a time. Still, in 1963 he gathered together the poems for his next book, For the Union Dead. The work in this volume for the most part consists of recastings of other writers' prose: letters from Elizabeth Bishop, essays by Jonathan Edwards, etc. Now and again Lowell revamps his own earlier poems. He seems even more relaxed with respect to the construction of his poems, as well as in his emotional regard for his subjects. Everyone now supplies fodder for his poetic canon. The man who wrote “Where the Rainbow Ends,” in Lord Weary's Castle, is someone Lowell might never have known—might even have refused knowing.

But the greatest change in For the Union Dead is its political topicality. The title poem expresses, as Lowell said in an interview he gave a few years later, his “pious … [but] very bitter feelings” about America. These sentiments foreshadow, over the next few years, Lowell's participation in the civil rights movement and anti-war activism. Times were changing, and Lowell found himself at the cutting edge. When he declined a White House invitation in 1965 and used the occasion to make a public statement against the war, it became front-page news. In many ways, this incident, like his decision to march on the Pentagon two years later, was a way of acting out his poetic dissent, which in turn was an extension of his personal revolt against his family.

In one form or another, these public events crept into Lowell's Near the Ocean, published in 1967. The book also included a number of his idiosyncratic but interesting translations. The fact is, Lowell knew well few of the languages from which he translated. He simply considered the original verse so much booty to be plundered as an excuse for his own poetic expression. It was the identical attitude Lowell had toward conversations, poems, private actions—indeed, the whole world. “You can say anything in a poem—if you place it properly,” he declared at the time.

In 1967 Notebook appeared. The book was literally a diary of unrhymed sonnets that Lowell would perpetually revise (it remained the source of all his future books). The first new version came out in 1968. These “sonnets” are, almost without exception, chunks of unprocessed prose, often of an obscure, intransigently personal meaning. As usual, private conversations and letters are used freely in the poems. When historical details or people are discussed, the details float in a free-associational vacuum. There are, nonetheless, a few diamonds in this rough—Lowell did not lose his ability to write great isolated lines—but they remain unintegrated. With the popularity, at the time, of theories of disposable or constantly changing art, it is no surprise that Lowell was praised as a poet in the forefront of the new aesthetic.

In the same year, Lowell was taken off Thorazine and put on a new drug called lithium carbonate. Its users, Hamilton reports, tend to appear “suspended, uninvolved, disinclined to ‘follow through’ their feelings.” Regardless of Lowell's new treatment, he was still prone to attacks and breakdowns. He and Elizabeth Hardwick finally divorced in 1972. During this time Lowell worked on the poems that would appear in three books published the following year: For Lizzie and Harriet, The Dolphin, and History. Comprised largely of revisions of the Notebook poems, Lowell goes a step further by making unprecedented use of some desperate and vulnerable letters written by his distraught wife during the breakup of their marriage. Lowell's fervently pursued ideal of an exact correspondence between art and life reaches its cruel and tasteless conclusion in the mockery of Elizabeth Hardwick that is implicit in these poems.

Before Lowell published these books, Elizabeth Bishop warned him that “art just isn't worth that much.” Lowell never adequately explained to Elizabeth Bishop why he chose to publish them; in fact, he never adequately attempted to explain it to anyone. Ian Hamilton chooses not to speculate on the question. And in Lowell's last book, Day by Day, published in 1977, the year of his death, he only writes: “We were asked to be obsessed with writing / and we were.” Having observed the noble calling of poetry degenerate, in Lowell, into a form of abuse, the lines lose their intended Romantic effect. In the light of Lowell's late career, it reads like no more than a poor excuse.

What the foregoing chronology of the life and career of Robert Lowell omits is that which constitutes a sizable bulk of Hamilton's book: the unspeakably sad narrative of Lowell's lifelong struggle with insanity. Nothing quite prepares the reader for the shock and horror of this. The fits of violence (he broke Jean Stafford's nose twice), the abusive telephone calls, the cold imperiousness to his friends and family, the handcuffs, the jails and the mental clinics—each episode more terrible, and more difficult to read, than the last. Interestingly, there are few remarks by Lowell himself on his illness (apart from the selections from the draft autobiography). But when he does speak of it, he is chillingly eloquent.

The night before I was locked up I ran about the streets of Bloomington Indiana crying out against devils and homosexuals. … I suspected I was a reincarnation of the Holy Ghost. To have known the glory, violence and banality of such an experience is corrupting.

More often we are given the testimony of the friends and witnesses who suffered along with Lowell. Of these, Elizabeth Hardwick suffered the most and has the most to tell. Throughout, she does so with exemplary tact and evenness of tone. Reading her comments we cannot forget that all the details she provides must really only be a very small part of the whole sad story. As others who have written about this book have remarked, manic depression involves long, private, and, in the end, unconveyable silences.

Next to Elizabeth Hardwick's brave and forthright account, the tales of certain other people interviewed by Ian Hamilton seem shoddy in the extreme. Unlike Hardwick, these people forget Lowell's greatness as a poet, or are above mentioning it. There were, for example, the faculty members at the University of Cincinnati who believed that the insane Lowell “was behaving just as some of them hoped a famous poet would behave,” or that “‘mad’ was … another mask of Lowell's genius,” or that “his ranging eloquence [was a] sign … of a newly liberated spirit.” Alongside such idiocy, Hardwick's wisdom and magnanimity seem all the more impressive.

That Hamilton has fashioned a rather disproportionate picture cannot be denied. But neither can the fact that he has done hard and valuable work in writing this book. Apart from his numerous interviews, he has read all the important letters to and from Lowell's friends and colleagues, chief among them Allen Tate, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, and Randall Jarrell. He has also read the work of all these people as well, and immersed himself in the culture they helped create in the years after the war.

Hamilton's sparse critical remarks—clipped as they sometimes seem as a result of the book's factual emphasis—have an admirable objectivity about the uneven quality of Lowell's oeuvre. Though scarcely perfect in this regard, he shines when considered alongside most of his American counterparts. He understands, for example, that the “high rhetoric” of Lowell's early style “need not inflate or falsify”—a notion that is at odds with Lowell's later aesthetic position. However, he is less charitable than he should be toward “The Mills of the Kavanaughs” and tends, now and again, when discussing the later free-form poetry, to fall into the conventional trap of the critical proponents of avant-garde American poetry: namely, to point out a good rhythm here, a fine colloquialism there, and a touching, if wholly personal, allusion around back. (One might as well be criticizing a technical manual, if that's all poetry demands of the critic.) Still, when all is said and done, Hamilton is more rigorous than most have been when dealing with Lowell's poetry.

Nonetheless, one does feel that a large and significant part of Robert Lowell is missing from this biography. Where is the man who worked, when he wasn't sick, sixteen hours a day? Where is the poet who spent, as John Berryman related, one hundred hours on a single stanza of “Beyond the Alps”—only later to delete it? Where is Lowell's intellectual connection with all the books he read so voraciously? Nowhere, alas, in Hamilton's book.

When one has plowed through all the hospital reports, the number of policemen it took to subdue Lowell on this or that occasion, the accounts of Lowell's endless rantings about Hitler and Christ, the revelations of various girl friends (such as the one from Cambridge who found Lowell “wasn't crazily sort of sexy at all. He was very huggy”), one is left less with a chronicle of an important poet with a powerful sense of poetic vocation than with a sad madman who made life hell for everyone around him—and not least for himself. After all this, it is difficult to remember that Robert Lowell was also an artist, and that the appreciation of an artist begins, not with voyeurism, but with his art.