“I go over my life trying to understand it—I think in a way I never understood it,” Robert Lowell admitted to Peter Taylor, many years after they had begun their writing careers together at Kenyon College, and he agreed with George Santayana's saying that “I have enjoyed writing about my life more than living it.” Certainly Lowell's life was desperately unhappy much of the time, though it is not certain whether his catastrophic personal existence drove him to be a writer, or his writing drove him to destroy not only his own happiness but the happiness of those who were closest to him. What is clear is that, for Lowell, poetic inspiration was linked to personal misery, and that he was as gifted at causing pain to himself and others as he was at transforming it into memorable poems.

Ian Hamilton has made an absorbingly truthful account of Lowell's self-destructive career [in Robert Lowell: A Biography], documenting all the suffering without trying to excuse the conduct and showing how Lowell's public success only seemed to plunge him deeper into private despair. Being a Lowell of Boston meant growing up in the shadow of greatness; his father never lived up to his wife's expectations, and young Robert, after enduring a Boston prep school (where he showed his first poems to Richard Eberhart) and a year at Harvard (where he met Robert Frost), escaped to the South; there he spent one of his few happy interludes, at Allen Tate's country house in Tennessee, in the spring and summer of 1937, when he was twenty. The house was full of writers (Lowell had to pitch a tent on the lawn), and all were busy—as Ford Madox Ford's wife put it, “In every room in the house there is a typewriter and at every typewriter there is a genius.” The intensity of this literary life suited him, and at the end of the summer he followed John Crowe Ransom in his move from Vanderbilt to Kenyon College, accompanied by a small writers' colony that included Randall Jarrell and Peter Taylor. Lowell went from Kenyon, where he contributed his first important poems to the Kenyon Review, to Louisiana State, where he taught and contributed more poems to the Southern Review, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. His early fame reached its peak with his second volume of poems, Lord Weary's Castle, which received a Pulitzer Prize in 1946 and soon won him the further honors of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an appointment as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress.

Having climbed to such a pinnacle at the age of thirty, Lowell seemed to have nowhere to go but down, and in 1949 he suffered the first fit of manic depression which troubled all his remaining thirty years. His first wife, Jean Stafford, and loyal friends like Tate and Jarrell and Taylor were unable to save him from the self-destruction which his genius seemed to require, and they watched appalled as he raved madly through jails and asylums, miraculously recovering long enough to produce new poetry out of the wreckage of his life. The remainder of Lowell's poetic career was a precipitous sequence of public triumphs and private breakdowns, during which he became the most admired and influential poet of his generation while leaving a trail of wailing women and children, the raw material for poems distilled out of despair.

As biographer, Hamilton maintains a fairly objective view of Lowell's explosive personality, but as critic he shows a bias toward the later poetry, disparaging “the elemental moonscape of Lord Weary” while praising “Life Studies' important gains.” This preference for the later over the earlier Lowell is also reflected in Vereen Bell's study, Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero, with its title drawn from one of the late, irregular “sonnets” of Notebooks. Bell treats Lowell as a nihilist throughout his poetry, speaking of the “religious nihilism” of the early Lowell as if it were simply a prelude to the later, agnostic nihilism: “The order of the early poems is violently formal,” he says, “Not God's but the poet's.” Though Lowell was a converted Catholic “more Roman than the Romans” when he wrote Lord Weary's Castle, and though he experienced what he himself believed was “an incredible outpouring of grace” shortly before his first breakdown in 1949, both Hamilton and Bell cast doubt on the sincerity of Lowell's faith and regard his later “confessional” style as a truer expression of his real skepticism than his early “apocalyptic” style was of his presumed belief. It is clear from the biography, however, that Lowell's madness increased as he grew older, and that writing poetry came to be more and more a form of therapy, a relief from his bouts of uncontrollable violence. Bell sees no apparent contradiction in stating that Lowell's last collection, Day by Day, shows that “the poet himself has failed in his own eyes as a human being” while “the poems of Day by Day are closer to us than Lowell's other work, more immediate and more intimate.” If failure as a human being leads to success as a poet, the only logical conclusion to draw is that nihilism is good for poetry—a terrible lesson to learn from any poet, however gifted.

Robert Lowell remains an impressive but disturbing figure, whether as man or as poet, and it may be a long time before a completely fair and objective appraisal of his life and work can be made. Hamilton's biography is the fullest presentation of his life so far and is to be welcomed in spite of the morbidity of the subject. But the achievement of the poetry is bound to be seen as something greater than nihilism; for as the enthusiastic response of Randall Jarrell to the poems of Lord Weary's Castle reminds us, when they are quoted in the biography, “They are some of the best poems anyone has written in our time and are sure to be read for hundreds of years.” The unhappy life may have been the price Lowell had to pay for his poetry, but the poetry at its best redeems the life. Lowell asked in one of his last poems, “Is getting well ever an art, or art a way to get well?” His poetry did not cure his madness, but the best of it—early as well as late—goes on illuminating the darkness that was, as he recognized, not only part of him but part of his age.