Robert Lowell #

Robert Lowell is often considered the doyen of what is called “Confessional Poetry” in the tradition of Gerard Manly Hopkin’s. Kay Redfield Jamison in “Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character”, claims though he became a public person, he was never a public poet; he was, instead, a figure beheld in contemplation, working out the meanings of his thinking in plain view with what Joyce Carol Oates called Lowell’s ironic dignity”.

Robert Lowell was born to an affluent well established American family. However, he was the unplanned and unwanted child of Charlotte Winslow Lowell and Robert Traill Spence Lowell III, a naval officer who later worked for Lever Brothers, the English soap manufacturer.

His mother was judged, according to the standards of the time, to be ironhanded and manipulative; she viewed her husband, a meek man whose soul, Lowell wrote, “went underground” in his forties, as feckless, dandyish, and abstract—a judgment Lowell shared, though he tempered it with pity.

Together, these two horribly matched people created a troubled, physically powerful, emotionally frail, and altogether brilliant child, whose provocations shaped their lives. Various strategies to cope with Lowell’s unruliness were adopted and discarded, but, eventually, his poetry was judged to be good enough to make acceptance worth whatever its costs.

The family psychiatrist, Merrill Moore, informed the Lowells that their son was a genius: everybody would have to “adjust” to him as he was. This held true throughout his life.

Dan Chiasson’s The Illness and Insight of Robert Lowell, brings clinical expertise to the poet’s case.

In his poetry, Lowell put his manic-depressive illness (now known as bipolar disorder), his marital problems, or his stay (one of many) in a mental hospital, or even other people’s private letters, on open display.

Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia by E. Digby Baltzell highlights the cultural differences in early America between Boston and Philadelphia:

“The preeminent families of both Boston and Philadelphia traditionally refer to themselves as clans. In our increasingly atomized society, where even the nuclear family is being questioned. In none of the 334 biographies in the Boston and Philadelphia samples, incidentally, was there recorded a single divorce.

“The clan is a historical as well as a biological unit. It is also the bearer of cultural and familial values. As the Puritan ethic was infinitely historical, whereas the Quaker ethic was definitely not, one would expect the clan idea to have more force in Boston than in Philadelphia. ‘Philadelphia,’ rightly noted Amory, ‘asks about a man’s parents; Boston wants to know about his grandparents.’

I should add that what counts in Philadelphia is largely the wealth of one’s parents; in Boston the undoubted importance of wealth is balanced by pride in ancestral achievements.

This is in accord with what we found statistically, that the Bostonians not only were men of greater distinction but also came from families with longer traditions of leadership. The fifty Boston families were of English stock with the exception of the Agassizes from Switzerland, the Wendells from Holland, the Forbeses from Scotland, and the Jacksons from Ireland.

Though English stock predominated in Philadelphia, the Lloyds, Cadwaladers, and Robertses were originally from Wales; the Wistars and Peppers, from Germany; the Bories and Markoes, from France; the Duanes, Careys, and Meades, from Ireland; and the city’s most famous modem banking family, the Drexels, was founded by an itinerant portrait painter from Austria.

Almost all of the fifty Boston families were Puritan Congregationalists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The largest number of Philadelphia families were originally Quakers; some were Anglicans from the very beginning; and others, like the Ingersolls and Meigses, were originally Congregationalists from New England who became Presbyterians after settling in Philadelphia. This difference can be explained partly by the fact that whereas nearly all the Boston families originated in Massachusetts (mostly in the seventeenth century), many of the Philadelphia families came from other colonies in the course of the eighteenth century.

“Upper-class endogamy has been extremely strong in both Boston and Philadelphia from the outset. As we shall see, Lloyds, Logans, Norrises, Morrises, Pembertons, Fishers, Cadwaladers, and Biddies were all intermarried in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, and the pattern has continued down to the present.

In Boston, the rate of interclan marriage was even higher, especially among the Essex County families who came to that city in the eighteenth century. Joseph Cabot, for instance, married Elizabeth Cabot and built a great house in Salem in 1748. From their eleven children descended many of the Cabots, Lees, Jacksons, Winthrops, Lodges, Lowells, and Holmeses of Boston.

The Puritan ethic was infinitely historical as clans were important. Boston wants to know about his grandparents. In a highly hierachical society you had to be careful who you mixed with; in Boston, everybody knows that ‘the Lowells talk only to Cabots, and the Cabots talk only to God.’

Lowell was the third generation child of a highly reputable family. His grandfather was of notable distinction, while his father much less so. Robert was the unplanned and unwanted child of a weak father and a strong mother and therefore suffered an affluent but emotionally and psychologically deprived childhood. Early psychiatrictic sessions suggested a difficult boy who others would have to cope with.

In 1942, 25 years old, Robert Lowell attempted to enlist in the US Army and Navy, but was rejected on medical grounds. Two years later he was drafted but refused to serve due to his objections to the allied bombings of civilians. He was sentenced to a year and a day, of which he served five months in West Street Prison, Manhattan.

Lowell, first married novelist Jean Stafford but left her for Hardwick in 1949, weeks after Lowell was hospitalized for his first major mental breakdown.

Their relationship, by all accounts, was both personally tortuous and intellectually invigorating. The marriage was marked by numerous other mental breakdowns and, eventually, a final betrayal. In 1970, Lowell took up with a younger writer, Caroline Blackwood, while teaching at Oxford. Hardwick, who was left to care for their daughter, Harriet, alone on top of keeping her own writing career going, would write that she felt very much “like a widow.”

In 1954, Lowell also spent three weeks in the locked ward of Payne Whitney Clinic in New York City. In recovery, at the suggestion of his psychiatrist, Lowell began his writing, marked by “images and ironic or amusing particulars.”

It is interesting that he became a mentor to a former student, Sylvia Plath, who too refused to become a passive victim, rather a defiant indomitable spirit of resistance; expressing her pain and “her cries from the heart”.

Another student, Elizabeth Bishop, with her demons, prefers to objectify her issues behind the protective mask of universal experience.

Both Bishop and Lowell experienced affluent but emotionally deprived families.

Lowell was exempt from Bishop’s outrage over the dominating School of Anguish, as she scornfully called the poets—Anne Sexton, John Berryman—who had learned from his example. (An even more telling term she used was “the self-pitiers.”) In an interview for a Time cover story on Lowell, in 1967, she was careful to implicate only his imitators when she said, “You just wish they’d keep some of these things to themselves.”

Despite denials, while most literature appears detached, invariably writing stems from a thinly veiled fictionalised portrayal of the author’s life.

Elizabeth Hardwick,. his second wife, a figure of equanimity and patience, remarked of Lowell that he seemed to like women writers.

Lowell saw writing both as a way to understand his compulsions and as a compulsion in its own right, a roundabout leading out of trouble and immediately back in. From his thirties on, Lowell suffered the relentless cycles of bipolar disorder, the “irritable enthusiasm” that lurched him upward before landing him in despair.

Elizabeth Hardwick played a large role propping up her ex-husband’s ego and career, after his being released from many visits to the hospital. Rather than shattered by his many betrayals, despite the humiliation of his many affairs. she too was reborn many times.