The Poet as Mental Patient - Part Twelve of 'Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health' by Dave Jaffe

     The Poet As Mental Patient by Dave Jaffe


    If there is or was an American aristocracy, Robert Lowell belonged to it.
    The tall, slightly over six foot tall poet was born to two parents who could both trace their ancestry back to some of the earliest white settlers  in the United States.
    Lowell's mother Charlotte Winslow, knew that her ancestry went back to early 17th century Massachusetts. His father also named Robert could do the same. "You didn't land on Plymouth Rock," the African-American leader Malcolm X. once told a  group of his black brothers and sisters in the early 1960's. "It landed on you."
     In contrast, some of Robert Lowell's ancestors probably did land on Plymouth Rock. Lowell grew up in a privileged but not too rich household in Massachusets. He was born in 1917 and died in 1977.
    He married three times. First off he wed Jean Stafford, a talented writer. Next came Elizabeth Hardwick, another gifted author. They had a daughter together. Finally Lowell married a multimillionairess, an English woman named Lady Caroline Blackwood who also was a writer. She and Lowell had a son.
   For all these women and for Lowell himself, life was often hellish. For Lowell was a manic-depressive. Or as we'd say to-day, "He had bi-polar syndrome." By his early 30's, Lowell or 'Cal' as he was known to his friends, suffered mental breakdowns. He sometimes spent weeks, and sometimes months in mental hospitals.
     Yet Lowell also wrote some great poetry. He wrote sonnets, plays, and traditional verse. He also translated poetry by international poets. In the 1950's and 1960's he wrote what was called 'confessional poetry' which was often poetry about his personal life. Many other poets after Lowell and influenced by him, started to do the same.
     "I  am so tired and bad," he wrote after he went to Chicago in 1968 to protest the Vietnam war at the Democratic convention. At the time he was  friendly with and a supporter of Eugene McCarthy. McCarthy was
    a prominent U.S. Senator whose challenge in the Democratic primaries to then-Democratic president Lyndon Baines Johnson, forced Johnson to resign as president of the United States in 1968.
     "cliches are wisdom," Lowell continued
     " The cliches of paranoia. On this shore the fall of the high tide waves is straggling joshing
     march of soldiers...on the march for me."
    Lowell's mastery of verse was unique. He belonged to a generation of great American poets, many of whom like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Randall Jarrell and John Berryman led troubled lives. Plath, Sexton and Berryman all committed suicide.
     Lowell died peacefully in 1977 in New York City while riding in a taxi cab. He was was one of America's greatest poets.