Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character

Robert Lowell was at the forefront of post WWII American letters, his volumes of poetry The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Life Studies, and Lord Weary’s Castle among the most lauded poetry of his generation. In addition to winning the Pulitzer twice and he was also a sought after Harvard professor, international lecturer and literary star even among the Vietnam era counterculture as an antiwar activist. Born to a noted New England family full of famous ancestors, Lowell lived a life of literary and academic achievement, despite a debilitating what was then called manic-depressive illness and is now known to be bipolar disorder. 

From his 20s in the 1940s, until the time of his death in 1977 at age 60, Lowell was institutionalized over a dozen times, sometimes for months, subjected to repeated shock therapy, a laundry list of ineffectual therapies, and psychosis drugs. As much as it turned his life into a nightmare many of his doctors, his family and even Lowell himself believed that his cycles of psychoses was inextricably linked to his creative process as a poet and writer.

 Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry at John Hopkins School of Medicine, in her lengthy introduction to Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire   explains that she sets out not to write a standard biography, it is more a study Lowell’s bipolar illness and its relationship to his creative life.   

Aside from his very real illness, Lowell was haunted by such personal demons as the knowledge that Charlotte Lowell, his own mother, did not want him and in fact contemplated suicide rather than giving birth. So much of Lowell’s family history and his own private life became the subjects of his poetry and prose, indeed, his public confessional to an private world of troubled relationships, violent mood swings, unbridled acting out, and crushing remorse.  

Despite his many problems, Lowell had such personal magnetism that colleagues and friends giving him a pass for sometimes extreme manic episodes as that of an eccentric academic artist and his erratic behavior including public nudity, he was seen at the Metropolitan Opera conducting the orchestra from the audience. He made passes at colleagues and had flagrant affairs with his college students. When his manic cycles hit high gear he claimed to be everyone from Caesar to Napoleon or Hitler.  His episodes became fodder that “added to the mad, brilliant poet myth.”

Jamison chronicles the poet’s tumultuous three marriages, most vividly his 20 years with writer Elizabeth Hardwick, whom he wed just two weeks after one of his most protracted and severe hospitalizations and against the advice of his father. Hardwick stayed devoted to Lowell, even though she tolerated public humiliation and even violent episodes triggered by his drinking. But she viewed his madness as an illness and was determined to stay by him. 

After he recovered and was successfully “cured” for almost three years, their marriage flourished and their daughter Harriet was born in 1957; he couldn’t have been a prouder father, but within months his life started to fall apart again. Jamison notes that Hardwick wrote the most clinically accurate descriptions of Lowell’s range of illness and incisive observation about the triggers of his cycles.

Dr. Jamison travels back and forth in time, sometimes jarringly, to the case histories of Lowell’s ancestors and chronicling Lowell’s marriages and affairs with other women. The author’s detailing of the science and study of psychosis is fascinating, even if it is dense material for lay readers and frequently interrupts the rhythm of an ostensible biography. Apart from that, Jamison equalizes in her passionate humanistic approach in giving Lowell and those in his life dimension, through often tragic circumstances. And Jamison writes passionately about poetry and poets, as she explores Lowell’s dark artistic chambers, if not his creative DNA.