Robert Lowell, Poet With a Mind on Fire
ROBERT LOWELL was born in Boston in 1917 as Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV, and raised at 91 Revere Street in the elite neighborhood of Beacon Hill. He wrote poetry about big subjects, and coined striking lines and phrases. Often deeply depressed, sometimes ecstatic, he bravely — almost brutally — shared some of his deepest feelings. He found the writing of poetry both a torment and a great vocation, and made himself one of the great poets of the 20th century.
Lowell taught a course at Boston University and was an important mentor to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.
Both the Lowells, and his mother’s people, the Winslows, were proud old New England families. Lowell was a great-grandnephew of the poet James Russell Lowell and a cousin of the poet Amy Lowell. He cared about the past, and felt its weight with a quiet violence. In his conviction that a man exists in relation to History, both of his family and region, Robert Lowell was very much a traditional New Englander.
Yet he was also fiercely independent in mind and temperament. He was fascinated by the problem of remaining an individual when confronted by authority, or by those in disagreement.
His parents were the height of Beacon Hill respectability. They were sixth cousins of one another, wealthy, intelligent, raised in the same culture and social class, not particularly in love but determined to honor the forms of marriage, to keep up appearances. Robert’s mother was strong-willed, his father rather weak. Both took for granted that there must be a chasm between one’s private thoughts and what one says aloud, in public.
This was a problem for young Robert because he had odd and aggressive impulses, displayed bullying or eccentric behavior, and found his parents stifling. He needed fresh air. Stung by her son’s inability to soberly fit in, Robert’s mother let her son know that she hadn’t intended him to be born.
There was in Robert Lowell, from a young age, a horrified awareness of the way that customs, laws, rules, and religious authority enforce conformity.
On the other hand, even in the Bible, there was freedom, novelty, experiment — openness to experience. His own eccentricity was, at times, shaming, but in some of his rule-breaking he found a certain grace.
Poems had rules — sort of. You couldn’t just write down gibberish, and Lowell began by writing metered verse. But poetry took license with meaning. To a cloistered young man from a “fine family,” poetry felt like freedom, an escape from the respectable. As a poet, he could take his eccentricity out for a walk — even let it run…
Lowell went off to Saint Marks prep school, worked hard there, read a great deal, and made friends to whom he was proudly loyal all his life. But his moods were so erratic that his prep school nickname was “Cal” — short for Caligula. From an early age, he feared that mental illness might muzzle him, drive him to do something for which he’d be imprisoned, or leave him unable to grasp what was happening to him.
On the other hand, he — mostly — enjoyed being manic.
In 1934, at 17, Lowell vowed to become a professional poet, and he wrote 30 poems that year. Most were about classic subjects: fire, good vs. evil, Jesus, Shakespeare, the Greek myths. Lowell started at Harvard, the proper place for bright Brahmin boys.
But he disliked Harvard. In 1937, Lowell quarreled with his father, and left Massachusetts for Nashville, Tennessee, where he found the poet Allen Tate and asked if he could stay in the Tate house.
Tate’s wife, with her own family and three guests already to cook and care for, told Robert, “We really haven’t any room — you’d have to pitch a tent on the lawn,” her way of saying, ‘No — please look elsewhere for housing.’ But Lowell heard it differently; at Sears, Roebuck he bought a cheap tent, which he pitched on the Tate’s lawn. For two months he took his meals with them.
When Allen Tate went to Kenyon College to teach, so did Lowell. He graduated summa cum laude in Classics. In the next few years, Lowell met two of his dearest writer friends, Randall Jarrell and Peter Taylor, converted to Roman Catholicism, married the novelist Jean Stafford, served five months in prison for refusing to fight in World War Two and wrote lots of poetry.
When Lowell was driving a car with Stafford as a passenger, he crashed the car into a wall. After the accident, Stafford needed several surgeries. Lowell himself was unhurt physically, but psychologically a mess.
He had a tumultuous married life. It’s hard to say he’d have been better off single because Jean Stafford was a good and interesting woman, as was his second wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. But Lowell made things hard for his wives. He and Jean Stafford both drank heavily, and hurt each other with the words they knew how to use so well. Stafford called him “The Back Bay Grizzly.” Lowell clung to the idea that the worst of his behavior was only partly his fault; he distanced himself from what it cost others.
He called his depressive moods “these wretched little black splinters.” Elizabeth Hardwick said later she’d had no idea what she was getting into when she married Robert Lowell but that, had she known, she’d have married him anyway. She found him sweet most of the time, as did their daughter Harriet, who once described her father as “present and loving, whatever his mental state, and wonderfully odd.”
Lowell also loved the poet Elizabeth Bishop. Few men propose marriage to alcoholic lesbians 12 years older than they are, but Lowell met Bishop at a dinner party in 1947 and they were dear friends for 30 years. Their poems are quite different — she was shy and sensible and her poems more whimsical and wry; his poems were heavier, in both good ways and bad.
In 1949, the year Lowell married Elizabeth Hardwick, he seemed sure that he was a prophet and once held a friend out an open window, while shouting poetry. It took four cops to handcuff him. Taken to a hospital, Lowell continued shouting and singing, tearing up what he could.
In 1954, he was committed to a locked ward of the Payne Whitney Clinic, a psychiatric hospital. There Lowell was given electroshock treatments. After three months, he was released. Talk therapy sessions at Payne Whitney had helped him come to rough terms with his past and, after leaving Payne Whitney, he plunged into writing a memoir, even convincing Elizabeth Hardwick to join him in moving to a house a block from his childhood home, to help him swim closer to the rush of childhood memories.
Formal language couldn’t capture his mental experience. In 1957, psychotic and about to be hospitalized for the fifth time, he published “Life Studies,” a pioneering work of “confessional” poetry, a collection which turned its back on respectability, described his torment in an open, unashamed way, and closed much of the gap between what he was thinking and what he was writing.
By 1967, lithium was available, and Lowell adored it for keeping the dark splinters at bay. He wrote his poetry, and had enough time and space and calm to also teach at Harvard, and do translation work. But it bothered him that Elizabeth Hardwick had so often seen his rages, his collapses. He wanted to start over with a woman who saw him as a gifted poet and a normal man.
By 1970, Lowell was living in England, where he fell in love with Lady Caroline Blackwood, a woman with a background quite like his own: famous family, gifted, erratic, and married twice before.
Lowell often felt small, and he tried to honor what was worthy. He wrote in one poem:
We are poor passing facts
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name
In 1960, Lowell vividly described contemporary poetry when he said, “Two poetries are now competing — a cooked and a raw.” Cooked poetry, to Robert Lowell, meant “a poetry of pedantry” often hatched at elite universities, full of archaic words and obscure references and ideally “digested by a graduate seminar.” On the other hand, “raw poetry”, to Lowell, consisted of “blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience” much of it by Beat poets in coffee houses. Raw poetry was full of energy but too often “a poetry of scandal.”
Lowell tried to steer between the raw and the cooked. He wrote about momentous subjects, wary of becoming one of those poets fascinated by things of no consequence. His poems honored simple, common words.
In “Waking Early Sunday Morning” (1967) he wrote this:
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 1977, when Robert Lowell was 60 years old, he died while sitting in the back of a yellow cab, heading for Manhattan. He left us striking phrases, such as: “A savage servility slides by on grease.”
And, in an elegy to poet John Berryman: “…we are words / John, we used the language as if we made it.”