SOURCE: "Damaged Grandeur: The Life of Robert Lowell," in Sewanee Review, Vol. CII, No. 1, Winter, 1994, pp. 121-31.

A meteorologist of late twentieth-century American poetry, noting changes in the literary climate, tuning his awareness to the shifting winds of reputation and ideology, will be aware of at least one major cooling trend. I am speaking of the decline in estimation of Robert Lowell's poetry. He is still taught, his importance is acknowledged, but I wonder how many younger poets actually read him anymore? During his lifetime it was quite another story. Early in Lowell's career Peter Viereck had judged him "best qualified to restore to our literature its sense of the tragic and the lofty." When Life Studies appeared in 1959, John Thompson wrote in the Kenyon Review that "the great past, Revolutionary America, the Renaissance, Rome, is all contemporary to him. He moves among its great figures at ease with his peers…. This is why, perhaps alone of living poets, he can bear for us the role of the great poet, the man who on a very large scale sees more, feels more, and speaks more bravely about it than we ourselves can do."

Largeness of scale was part of Lowell's makeup. He came into the world with a sense of grandeur: "Like Henry Adams, I was born under the shadow of the Dome of the Boston State House and under Pisces, the Fish, on the first of March 1917. America was entering the First World War and was about to play her part in the downfall of five empires." Thus begins Robert Lowell's unfinished autobiographical piece, unpublished during his lifetime but appearing in a slightly different form in his posthumously published Collected Prose under the title "Antebellum Boston." The two sentences I have quoted wonderfully capture Lowell's essence. If the dramatic self-proclamation seems presumptuous—well, the phenomenon of Robert Lowell was awe-inspiring. The juxtaposition of the personal with a crucial historical moment became a trademark of his poetry—"These are the tranquillized Fifties / and I am forty"—a delusion of grandeur that was perhaps not a delusion at all.

Robert Lowell has, as a historical poet, few rivals among modern writers. History! Few poets have the erudition (not to speak of the brazenness) to link their births with a world war and the decline of the British, German, Hapsburg, Czarist Russian, and Ottoman empires. But Lowell's preoccupation with historical turning points was an expression of his psychological makeup. Lowell suffered from manic-depressive mental illness (bipolar disorder), in which the manic flights took the form of highly excited identifications with powerful figures from history, such as Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler. This tendency began in childhood:

     And I, bristling and manic,
     skulked in the attic,
     and got two hundred French generals by name,
     From A to V—from Augereau to Vandamme.
     I used to dope myself asleep,
     naming those unpronounceables like sheep.

An obsession with Napoleon runs through Lowell's madness, an enthusiasm he shared, or so he claims in "Antebellum Boston," with his mother when she was a girl: "She began to bolt her food, and for a time slept on an Army cot and took cold dips in the morning. In all this she could be Napoleon made over in my grandfather's Prussian image. It was always my grandfather she admired, even if she called him Napoleon." Napoleon is a pint-sized image of domination. "Mother, her strong chin unprotected and chilled in the helpless autumn, seemed to me the young Alexander, all gleam and panache…. Mother, also, was a sort of commander in chief of her virgin battlefield." Alexander was another of Lowell's favorite tyrants: Robert Silvers recalls that "at Mt. Sinai [hospital] he talked in a wandering way about Alexander the Great—how Philip of Macedon had been a canny politician but Alexander had been able to cut through Asia." His manic attacks were sometimes heralded by his wearing a medallion of Alexander the Great around his neck, or reading Mein Kampf (Jonathan Miller writes that Lowell kept a copy of it inside the dustjacket of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal), or buying a bust of Napoleon and displaying it on his dining room table in his apartment on West 67th Street in New York.

If we will better understand Robert Lowell's life and art, we need first of all to examine at least briefly some of the preconceptions engendered by what has so far been the only biography of him available, Ian Hamilton's large, handsomely turned-out, but often misleading, work. As with Lawrance Thompson's biography of Robert Frost, many readers—even if they have not read the book—have a sense of the poet which they assume to be accurate. The Hamilton biography makes it too easy to come to conclusions about Lowell's megalomania. Even when the book was being written, I had my doubts about it. Ian Hamilton phoned me in 1980 or 81 to make an appointment for an interview, which he later broke. That made me wonder whether his research might not be hasty and hit-or-miss.

Certainly he reports on the more sensational aspects of Lowell's public life, rather than on the extraordinary life of the mind that gave Lowell's poetry its depth. In addition he thanks Jason Epstein of Random House "for commissioning the book," suggesting that he was hired to undertake the project rather than initiating it on his own. This makes one question his personal stake in the project. Despite adopting a consistently snide and carping tone throughout the book, Hamilton by the end becomes overwhelmed by the air of damaged grandeur associated with Lowell's life. The book ends with a quotation from King Lear: "We that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long."

Hamilton is a professional biographer who has gone on to write a book about J. D. Salinger and another called Writers in Hollywood—and to edit The Faber Book of Soccer. It's unfortunate that the "definitive" biographer of Robert Lowell, the subtleties of whose poems are extremely hard to grasp outside the American context, should not be an American. As an Englishman, Hamilton simply lacks the ear to interpret, or misses the tone of, much of the material he is confronted with. He presents Lowell's grandfather Arthur Winslow as "a Boston boy who had made his middle-sized pile as a mining engineer in Colorado … almost ridiculously proud of his descent from the New England Winslows who had supported George III," as though Winslow were some sort of jumped-up, socially insecure nouveau riche, not a typical Bostonian of good family. I've never heard the expression a Boston boy in my life. And the suggestion that Arthur Winslow had anything to worry about socially is ridiculous.

If Sylvia Plath's Ariel is as Lowell says in introducing that book, "the autobiography of a fever," Hamilton's biography of Lowell is the biography of a psychosis. But Lowell was, like Hamlet, "but mad north-north-west"; when the wind was southerly he too knew "a hawk from a handsaw." His attacks, and the subsequent recovery periods, typically lasted one to two months. Hamilton devotes roughly one-fourth of his account of Lowell's adult life to the poet's madness, thereby giving readers of the biography the impression that Lowell was off his rocker about twice as much of the time as he actually was. What astounded Lowell's friends was how quickly and substantially he was able to recover from his manic episodes: "In between, as you know," Blair Clark wrote, "Cal [Lowell's nickname from prep school on, inspired by his resemblance both to Shakespeare's Caliban and to the mad Roman emperor Caligula] functions brilliantly, and I mean this to apply not only to his writing but to his personal and family life." Writing for Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry (1986), which he also edited, Steven Gould Axelrod endeavors to explain why Hamilton's book has left readers with the sense that having read it, they know what there is to know about Robert Lowell: "First, of course, Hamilton's ability to persuade Lowell's intimates and executors to help him has seemed to give his book an official imprimatur. Second, Hamilton does indeed reveal more information about Lowell's private life, especially its scandalous side…. But I believe another factor has played a crucial role in the book's success. Hamilton's genius is in relating the most sordid personal details in a tone of effortless, agreeable superiority. Reading Robert Lowell: A Biography is like reading the National Enquirer firm in the conviction that one is actually perusing the Times Literary Supplement."

Lowell's second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, who was in the best, or worst, position to speak of his attacks and recoveries, has written that:

… it seemed so miraculous that the old gifts of person and art were still there, as if they had been stored in some serene, safe box somewhere. Then it did not seem possible that the dread assault could return to hammer him into bits once more.

He "came to" sad, worried, always ashamed and fearful; and yet there he was, this unique soul for whom one felt great pity…. Out of the hospital, he returned to his days, which were regular, getting up early in the morning, going to his room or separate place for work. All day long he lay on the bed, propped up on an elbow. And this was his life, reading, studying and writing. The papers piled up on the floor, the books on the bed, the bottles of milk on the window sill, and the ashtray filled…. The discipline, the dedication, the endless adding to his store, by reading and studying—all this had, in my view, much that was heroic about it.

To reverse the terms of the old Aristotelian chestnut, Lowell had the qualities of his defects. He had not only that sense of self-confidence without which it's hard to see how anyone writes poetry at all, but also the luck to have been born with a name and family tradition that lent authority to his utterances. Elizabeth Bishop put it this way: "I am green with envy of your kind of assurance. I feel I could write in as much detail about my uncle Artie, say—but what would be the significance? Nothing at all…. Whereas all you have to do is put down the names! And the fact that it seems significant, illustrative, American etc. gives you, I think, the confidence you display about tackling any idea or theme, seriously, in both writing and conversation. In some ways you are the luckiest poet I know!" And the unluckiest. Both as poet and man, Lowell presents an awesome spectacle of great gifts, great luck, and great misfortune.

The young Lowell was notorious for his singlemindedness, ambition, lack of humor, and belief in aristocratic ideals. "I am not flattered by the remark that you do not know where I am leading or that my ways are not your ways," he wrote at age twenty-three to his tyrannical mother: "I am heading exactly where I have been heading for six years. One can hardly be ostracized for taking the intellect and aristocracy and family tradition seriously." As a teenager he had prescribed for his friends not only a reading and self-improvement program, but even, during a summer on Nantucket with two schoolmates, the daily menu: "We had dreadful health food all the time. The diet was eels—cooked by me, badly—and a dreadful cereal with raw honey. All decided by Cal."

Lord Weary's Castle, Lowell's first major collection, can be seen as a proud, forbidding citadel that the poet erected around himself. The title was already a good indication that here was a poet who would concern himself with the exercise of power, both on the personal and political levels. Robert Hass, in the essay "Lowell's Graveyard" from Twentieth Century Pleasures, writes: "'The Quaker Graveyard' is not a political poem. I had assumed that it was, that its rage against the war and Puritan will and the Quakers of Nantucket who financed the butchery of whales was an attack on American capitalism. But a political criticism of any social order implies both that a saner one can be imagined and the hope or conviction that it can be achieved…. I went back to the poem looking for the vision of an alternative world. There is none." If optimism about alternative political solutions is the sine qua non of political poetry, then we conclude that Lowell was never a political poet at all. But I would have to disagree with Hass's strictures on political poetry. While remaining pessimistic about change, Lowell constantly engaged himself with the world of politics and power. His view of the radical alternatives to capitalism was just as dark as his critique of capitalism.

Received opinion has it Lowell started writing "personal" poetry only with Life Studies—a view that Robert Hass counters brilliantly in his essay:

I still find myself blinking incredulously when I read—in almost anything written about the poetry—that those early poems "clearly reflect the dictates of the new criticism," while the later ones are "less consciously wrought and extremely intimate." This is the view in which it is "more intimate" and "less conscious" to say "my mind's not right" than to imagine the moment when

        The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears
        The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,
        And hacks the coiling life out …

which is to get things appallingly wrong.

Lowell's manner in "The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket" is to manhandle the iambic pentameter with strong spondees and enjambments learned from Milton, and to express an extreme mental derangement through violent imagery and logical absurdities. Speaking of the lines "Where the heelheaded dogfish barks its nose / On Ahab's void and forehead," Hass comments: "The lines depend on our willingness to let barking dogs marry scavenging sharks in the deep places where men void and are voided. To complain about this is not to launch an attack on 'consciously wrought' but the reverse." So much for the fiction that in Life Studies Lowell conformed to a culture-wide shift from the cooked to the raw, from paleface to redskin—though he himself publicly made the case for such a view. For poets like Galway Kinnell, Robert Bly, and Adrienne Rich, free verse really does mean what the name implies. For Lowell what are erroneously called fixed forms meant freedom and madness, while free verse meant prose, sanity, and control.

In the deepest part of his psyche, Lowell was, I suspect, that tyrant, that pure id that always longed to "break loose," to dominate, to be the entire world. Writing "imitations" of poets from Homer to Pasternak, for example, he "Lowellized" (Hamilton's term) his originals, making their poems sound like his own. There was not a drop of Wordsworthian "wise passivity" in his veins. In a poem written later in life, he addressed a bit of light but telling raillery to his wife and daughter: "I hope, of course, you both will outlive me, / but you and Harriet are perhaps like countries / not yet ripe for self-determination."

His personality was far from monolithic. In person he could shamelessly bully the weak and even the strong, often charmingly. But the tyrant shared a bed with the rebel, as Lowell himself understood. His sense of humor—and Hamilton gives us little sense of it—was mischievously subversive. In "Grandparents," written when he inherited his grandfather's summer place, he grieves for his grandfather, who is "Never again to walk there, chalk our cues, / insist on shooting for us both," but he concludes "I hold an Illustrated London News—; / disloyal still, / I doodle handlebar / mustaches on the last Russian Czar." Being both dictator and revolutionary allowed him a unique view of politics. Given the contradictions inherent in this position, he naturally was a pessimist. His lines on Stalin could have referred to himself: "What raised him / was an unusual lust to break the icon, / joke cruelly, seriously, and be himself." Prometheus, in Lowell's Prometheus Bound, sums up the position: "It is impossible to think too much about power."

Lowell as a political poet remains, for all his brilliance and insight, something of a creature of the 1960s, together with the Kennedys, Eugene McCarthy, Che Guevara, and Lyndon Johnson, all of whom appear in his poems. Pronouncements on America from those years have a way of sounding, in retrospect, excitedly and unjustifiably apocalyptic. Hamilton's evaluation is sound: "His difficulty was that his image of America was not too sharply different from his image of himself." On the other hand it was Lowell's own violent nature, perhaps, that made him healthily skeptical of the glibness with which many of us promoted a potentially violent revolution during that giddy decade. If James Atlas's "Robert Lowell in Cambridge: Lord Weary" is accurate, Lowell's comments on former students who like me—fictionalized as Leonard Wiggins—had been swept up in left wing politics, were rather caustic but not unfair:

"What about Leonard Wiggins?" I said. He had gone out to California for the semester and "been through a lot of heavy changes," he reported in a letter I now quoted to Lowell.

"Yes, I gather he's brimming with revolutionary zeal," Lowell said, leaning forward to concentrate on my words. (What a keen pleasure that was!) He loved news of anyone he knew. "I like his early poems, but I can't follow what he's writing now. You wonder if there isn't too much California in it." (He always switched from "I" to "you," as if attributing his opinions to someone else.)

The side of Lowell's personality that needed to dominate was balanced by a side that liked to be led. Writing about his acrimonious home life with his parents, John Crowe Ransom (quoted in Steven Gould Axelrod's Robert Lowell: Life and Art, which contains some documentation Hamilton seems not to have seen) calls it "a bad hurt for a boy who would have revered all his elders if they were not unworthy." In the forties both Ransom and Allen Tate were to some degree surrogate fathers to Lowell, though Tate was extremely uncomfortable being called Father Tate.

Randall Jarrell, Lowell's elder by only three years (Lowell's pet name for him was the Old Man) always, though a lifelong close friend, remained a distant and austere critic of Lowell's poetry: "I have never known anyone who so connected what his friends wrote with their lives, or their lives with what they wrote. This could be trying; whenever we turned out something Randall felt was unworthy or a falling off, there was a coolness in all one's relations with him. You felt that even your choice in neckties wounded him." His relationship with Jarrell, who had the surest taste in poetry of anyone in his generation, is another example of Lowell's wonderful luck.

An even more important bit of luck was his marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick. Hardwick's acerbic wit, in conversation and in print, is famous if not notorious, and she is not, thank God, the saint that some readers of this biography might imagine. But she married, took care of, and tolerated all manner of outrageous behavior from a man who could be insufferable. (Though this is the image of him that predominates in Hamilton's book, most of the time Lowell was a fascinating conversationalist, very funny, affectionate and touchingly loyal to his friends.) Part of what made Hardwick stick with him was love; part must have been a dedication to literature. Jarrell expressed what many people thought: "You feel before reading any new poem of his the uneasy expectation of perhaps encountering a masterpiece." It's clear that Lowell needed something like Hardwick's astringency to keep his native wildness under control: "your old-fashioned tirade—/ loving, rapid, merciless—/ breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head." He had also loved the gift his first wife, Jean Stafford, had for malicious gossip and slander. "Calumny!", he would shout delightedly. "Here comes the black tongue!" Readers with a Freudian inclination will not be surprised to learn that Lowell's mother also had a wickedly sharp tongue.

It was inevitable, though, that Lowell would bite the hand that fed him. "O to break loose!", the opening of "Waking Early Sunday Morning," could have been his motto. After he left Hardwick, he wrote her: "What shall I say? That I miss your old guiding and even chiding hand. Not having you is like learning to walk. I suppose though one thing worse than stumbling and vacillating, is to depend on someone who does these things." Yet the sense of breaking loose that accompanied Lowell's estrangement from Elizabeth Hardwick and his move to England eventually brought personal unhappiness and confusion rather than clarity. His third marriage, to Caroline Blackwood, turned into a disaster. On the fourteen-line poems (it is not accurate to refer to them as sonnets) that he began writing in 1967 for Notebook, and continuing through 1973, that constitute History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin, I am inclined to agree with Ian Hamilton: "The death of Randall Jarrell had removed the one critical voice that Lowell was in fear of—What will Randall think of this? had always been one of his first worries. It is possible that Jarrell might have found most of these new fourteen-liners slack, near-journalistic, or too much like casual diary jottings; they might have seemed to him too mumblingly unrhetorical, too self-indulgent. This is guessing; but there is a sense in which Lowell's new surge of eloquence is also a surge of truancy from the idea of some absolute critical authority, a 'breaking loose' from the requirement never to write badly."

Part of what is wrong with the fourteen-liners is a formal problem. Lowell's willfulness led him to think that if he could convince himself of the truth of something, then that was all that needed to be done. The fourteen-liners were little molds into which he could pour whatever. The mere fact that they resembled sonnets was enough to make them do what sonnets have traditionally done in English poetry. In an afterthought to Notebook 1967–68 he avers: "My meter, fourteen line unrhymed blank verse sections, is fairly strict at first and elsewhere, but often corrupts in single lines to the freedom of prose. Even with this license, I fear I have failed to avoid the themes and gigantism of the sonnet." He was guarding the wrong flank: the poems need more, not less, of the traditional virtues (which he derides as "gigantism") of the sonnet sequence. The gigantism came not from his approximation of the sonnet form, but from his own megalomania.

"Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—/ why are they no help to me now / I want to make / something imagined, not recalled?" Lowell asks in his last book, Day by Day. Perhaps they would have been a help to him, if he had the discipline and deliberation to return to them. Hamilton identifies another problem of the "sonnets" as one of tone: "There is something glazed and foreign in their manner of address, as if they sense an audience too far-off, too blurred to be worth striving for." Lowell at his best is a very grounded, personal writer, and his prefatory remark to Notebook 1967–68, "Accident threw up subjects, and the plot swallowed them—famished for human chances," suggests an impersonality far from his genius. Notebook and its later incarnations have been seen by some critics as attempts to rival John Berryman's Dream Songs. If this was the case, Lowell might have done well to emulate the Dream Songs' formal division into stanzas. Furious debate surrounded the ethics of Lowell's having included the letters, telephone conversations, etc., of Elizabeth Hardwick in his late books, The Dolphin and For Lizzie and Harriet. His friend William Alfred was strongly against it. W. H. Auden said he would never speak to Lowell again if he published the Hardwick material. Elizabeth Bishop wrote him an impassioned letter trying to dissuade him: "That is 'infinite mischief,' I think. The first one, page 10, is so shocking—well, I don't know what to say…. One can use one's life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn't changed them … etc. But art just isn't worth that much…. It is not being "gentle" to use personal, tragic, anguished letters that way—it's cruel." To Lowell, though, life and art were one. His loyalties were, finally, to his work, to the idea that, as Frank Bidart has written, "the only thing posterity will not forgive you for is a bad book."

But in his last book, Day by Day, Lowell seems to say that he has botched not only his life but his poetry as well. Perhaps he was writing his own epitaph when he addressed these words to his namesake: "yours the lawlessness / of something simple that has lost its law, / my namesake, not the last Caligula." He could perhaps have endured the pain of inflicting pain on his family. In fact in the last poem of The Dolphin he shoulders that responsibility:

    I have sat and listened to too many
    words of the collaborating muse,
    and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
    not avoiding injury to others,
    not avoiding injury to myself—
    to ask compassion … this book, half fiction,
    an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting—
    my eyes have seen what my hand did.

Writing in the American Poetry Review in 1973, Adrienne Rich delivered the harshest condemnation of the three books of "sonnets." Harsh as these words are, it is hard to disagree with Rich's assessment of the lines I have just quoted, except that what she sees as vindictiveness is more truly a colossal thoughtlessness: "I have to say that I think this is bullshit eloquence, a poor excuse for a cruel and shallow book, that it is presumptuous to balance injury done to others with injury done to myself—and that the question remains, after all—to what purpose? The inclusion of the letter poems stands as one of the most vindictive and meanspirited acts in the history of poetry, one for which I can think of no precedent: and the same unproportioned ego that was capable of this act is damagingly at work in all three of Lowell's books."

Lowell was not completely written out when he died at sixty. The poems in Day by Day demonstrate that he had abandoned the crutch the fourteen-line form had become for him during the period of History; the anguished candor of the new poems suggests that, had he lived, he might have achieved another poetic breakthrough as important as the one he brought off in Life Studies. Sixty might, in some people, seem a ripe enough age to die. Not for Lowell, of whom one can say that he "should have died hereafter." In the meantime one looks forward to a better biography of Robert Lowell, one that will give readers a more rounded picture of the Cal his friends put up with, laughed about, became exasperated with, but always admired and deeply loved. To say that his friends laughed about him may sound cruel; but, sad as his life in some ways was, why not grant the man the credit of being one in a long line of aristocratic Boston eccentrics? Keith Botsford, who accompanied Lowell on a Congress for Cultural Freedom junket to South America, would visit Lowell in the hospital in Buenos Aires during one of his attacks: "I was brought up as a composer, and all he wanted me to do was whistle. Sometimes it was "Yankee Doodle Dandy" or "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Or it was Brandenberg concertos, Mozart piano concertos, anything. It was the one thing he craved, the one thing that would calm him. I'd be there two or three hours, just whistling until I was dry in the mouth. I'd whistle all the parts in the Ninth Symphony, or whatever, and he'd say, 'Yeah, but do the tympani bit.'"

I leave the last word to Peter Taylor, one of Lowell's oldest friends:

As poet, as man, he approaches the great mystery playfully and seriously at the same time. From the very beginning or from the time when I first knew him in his later teens, he seemed determined that there should be no split in his approach to understanding profound matters. He was searching for a oneness in himself and a oneness in the world. He would not allow that any single kind of experience denied him the right and access to some opposite kind…. He would boast at times that he had never lost a friend. He never even wanted to give up a marriage entirely. He wanted his wife and children around him in an old fashioned household, and yet he wanted to be free and on the town. Who doesn't wish for all that, of course? But he would have both. He wanted it all so intensely that he became very sick at times…. When one heard that he was dead and how he died in the back seat of a New York taxi cab, one could not help feeling that he had everything, even the kind of death he had always said he wanted.