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

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Manic speech is more pressured: See the review of sixteen studies (1,857 patients) of activity and behavior symptoms during mania in F. K. Goodwin and K. R. Jamison, Manic-Depressive Illness. Rapid or pressured speech was present in 88 percent of manic patients.

  Manic patients use more adjectives: N. C. Andreasen and B. Pfohl, “Linguistic Analysis of Speech in Affective Disorders,” Archives of General Psychiatry 33 (1976): 1361–67.

  with more color, and greater urgency: J. Zimmerman and L. Garfinkle, “Preliminary Study of the Art Productions of the Adult Psychotic,” Psychiatric Quarterly 16 (1942): 313–18; F. Reitman, Psychotic Art (London: Rutledge and Kegan Paul, 1950); E. C. Dax, Experimental Studies in Psychiatric Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1953); C. Enâchescu, “Aspects of Pictorial Creation in Manic-Depressive Psychosis,” Confinia Psychiatrica 14 (1971): 133–42.

  “Bizarre associations”: Vereen Bell, “Robert Lowell, 1917–1977,” Sewanee Review 86 (January–March 1978): 103.

  “talked almost without stopping”: Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918 (New York: Harcourt, 1964), 172–73.

  “Once the mind gets hot”: Virginia Woolf, Diary, October 22, 1927, in The Virginia Woolf Reader, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (Orlando: Harvest Book, 1984), 315.

  “Apparently the only disorder”: Emil Kraepelin, Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia, 31–35.

  “My thoughts bustle along”: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, quoted in John Livingstone Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 285.

  The abnormal flow: Femi Oyebode, Sims’ Symptoms in the Mind (Edinburgh: Saunders Elsevier, 2008), 157.

  Wisdom, Madness and Folly: John Custance, Wisdom, Madness and Folly.

  “Blue was the heavenly colour”: Ibid., 35–36.

  “In my mental or nervous fever”: Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Paul Gaugin, January 21, 1889, Vincent van Gogh—the Letters: The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition, ed. Leon Jansen, Hans Luyten, and Nienke Bakker (Amsterdam, The Hague, and Brussels: Thames and Hudson, 2009), letter 739.

  “especially poetical activity”: Emil Kraepelin, Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia, 17.

  “rhyming, playing on words”: B. Onuf, “The Milder Forms of Manic-Depressive Psychoses and the Manic-Depressive Constitution or Temperament,” Medical Record 94 (1918): 969–70.

  The Garden of Eden: Letter from Robert Lowell to William Empson, January 29, 1958, Letters, 310–11.

  “ ‘Come on, sir’ ”: Robert Lowell, “Visitors,” Collected Poems, 822.

  “Because of the more rapid flow”: E. Bleuler, Textbook of Psychiatry, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 468.

  “The molten stuff”: Seamus Heaney, “Robert Lowell,” a memorial address given at St. Luke’s Church, Redcliffe Square, London, October 5, 1977. Reprinted in Agenda 18 (Autumn 1980): 26.

  “so original, so perceptive”: Esther Brooks, “Remembering Cal,” 38.

  “I more than envy”: Letter from Stephen Spender to Robert Lowell, May 28, 1964, Houghton Library.

  “not just a technical mastery”: Al Alvarez, Observer, quoted on dust jacket of Robert Lowell, The Dolphin (London: Faber & Faber, 1973).

  Creativity and intelligence: For a review of the relationship between intelligence and creativity, see E. Jauk, M. Benedek, B. Dunst, and A. C. Neubauer, “The Relationship Between Intelligence and Creativity,” 212–21.

  A review of forty-five brain-imaging studies: R. Arden, R. S. Chavez, R. Grazioplene, and R. E. Jung, “Neuroimaging Creativity: A Psychometric View,” Behavior Brain Research 214 (2010): 143–56.

  Early studies: Emil Kraepelin, in Manic-Depressive Insanity (1921), cites earlier studies by Aschaffenburg and Isserlin, as well as his own clinical observations; G. Murphy, “Types of Word-Association in Dementia Praecox, Manic-Depressives, and Normal Persons,” American Journal of Psychiatry 79 (1923): 539–71; E. Bleuler, Textbook of Psychiatry.

  symptoms associated with mania: See, for example, L. Welch, O. Diethelm, and L. Long, “Measurement of Hyper-Associative Activity During Elation,” Journal of Psychology 21 (1946): 113–26; G. M. Henry, H. Weingartner, and D. L. Murphy, “Idiosyncratic Patterns of Learning and Word Association During Mania,” American Journal of Psychiatry 128 (1971): 564–74; L. Pons, J. I. Nurnberger, and D. L. Murphy, “Mood-Independent Aberrancies in Associative Processes in Bipolar Affective Disorder: An Apparent Stabilizing Effect of Lithium,” Psychiatry Research 14 (1985): 315–22; J. Levine, K. Schild, R. Kimhi, and G. Schreiber, “Word Associative Production in Affective Versus Schizophrenic Psychoses,” Psychopathology 29 (1996): 7–13.

  In studies of word fluency: See, for example, L. Pons et al., “Mood-Independent Aberrancies in Associative Processes in Bipolar Affective Disorder.”

  Lithium, presumably: L. L. Judd, B. Hubbard, D. S. Janowsky, et al., “The Effect of Lithium Carbonate on the Cognitive Functions of Normal Subjects,” 355–57; L. Pons, J. I. Nurnberger, and D. L. Murphy, “Mood-Independent Aberrancies in Associative Processes in Bipolar Affective Disorder,” 315–22; E. D. Shaw, J. J. Mann, P. E. Stokes, and A. Z. A. Manevitz, “Effects of Lithium Carbonate on Associative Productivity and Idiosyncrasy in Bipolar Outpatients,” 1166–69; J. H. Kocsis, E. D. Shaw, P. E. Stokes, et al., “Neuropsychological Effects of Lithium Discontinuation,” 268–76.

  In 1858, Franz Richarz: Quoted in A. Koukopoulos and A. Koukopoulos, “Agitated Depression as a Mixed State and the Problem of Melancholia,” Psychiatric Clinics of North America 22 (1999): 557–58.

  one hundred acutely manic patients: G. Winokur and M. Tsuang, “Elation Versus Irritability in Mania,” Comprehensive Psychiatry 16 (1975): 435–36.

  In 1946, researchers: L. Welch, O. Diethelm, and L. Long, “Measurement of Hyper-Associative Activity During Elation,” 113–26.

  use broader conceptual categories: N. C. Andreasen and P. S. Powers, “Creativity and Psychosis: An Examination of Conceptual Style,” Archives of General Psychiatry 32 (1975): 70–73; R. J. Larsen, E. Diener, and R. S. Cropanzano, “Cognitive Operations Associated with the Characteristic of Intense Emotional Responsiveness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53 (1987): 767–74; M. R. Solovay, M. E. Shenton, and P. S. Holzman, “Comparative Studies of Thought Disorders: I. Mania and Schizophrenia,” Archives of General Psychiatry 44 (1987): 13–20.

  distractibility and attentional problems: For a review of attentional deficits in those at risk for or who have bipolar illness, see F. K. Goodwin and K. R. Jamison, Manic-Depressive Illness, 106–7, 289–91, 296–97. See also C. E. Bearden, K. M. Hoffman, and T. D. Cannon, “The Neuropsychology and Neuroanatomy of Bipolar Affective Disorder: A Critical Review,” Bipolar Disorders 3 (2001): 106–50; U. S. Kolur, Y. C. J. Reddy, J. P. John, et al., “Sustained Attention and Executive Functions in Euthymic Young People with Bipolar Disorder,” British Journal of Psychiatry 189 (2006): 453–58.

  latent inhibition: S. H. Carson, J. B. Peterson, and D. M. Higgins, “Decreased Latent Inhibition Is Associated with Increased Creative Achievement in High-Functioning Individuals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (2003): 499–506; S. H. Carson, “Creativity and Psychopathology: A Shared Vulnerability Model,” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 56 (2011): 144–53; A. Abraham, S. Bendt, D. Ott, and D. von Cramon, “Creative Cognition and the Brain: Dissociations Between Frontal, Parietal-Temporal, and Basal Ganglia Groups,” Brain Research 1482 (2012): 55–70; A. Fink, M. Slamar-Halbedl, H. F. Unterrainer, and E. Weiss, “Creativity, Genius, Madness, or a Combination of Both?,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 6 (2012): 11–18.

  Lowell, in his essay: Robert Lowell, “Hawthorne’s Pegasus,” Collected Prose, 163.

  The majority of the British writers and artists: K. R. Jamison, “Mood Disorders and Seasonal Patterns in British Writers and Artists,” 125–34.

  Researchers at Harvard University: R. Richards and D. K. Kinne
y, “Mood Swings and Creativity,” Creativity Research Journal 3 (1990): 202–17; D. Schuldberg, “Six Subclinical Spectrum Traits in Normal Creativity,” Creativity Research Journal 13 (2000–2001): 5–16.

  “emotional excitement of poetry”: Letter from Charlotte Winslow Lowell to Jean Stafford, October 31, 1943, Blair Clark Papers, HRC.

  “need not thrive”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Blair and Holly Clark, November 29, 1954, Blair Clark Papers, HRC.

  “Men of genius”: Thomas Middleton Stuart, An Inaugural Essay on Genius and Its Diseases (New York: Collins and Company, 1837). First written as a thesis for the degree of doctor of medicine, April 6, 1819.

  He must sleep: Clinicians, patients and family members are well aware of the potential escalation into mania that can come from working and writing at too fevered a pitch; a lack of sleep is a common precipitant of mania: T. A. Wehr, D. A. Sack, and N. E. Rosenthal, “Sleep Reduction as a Final Common Pathway in the Genesis of Mania,” American Journal of Psychiatry 144 (1987): 201–4; D. Lam and G. Wong, “Prodromes, Coping Strategies, Insight and Social Functioning in Bipolar Affective Disorders,” Psychological Medicine 27 (1977): 1091–1100; G. Murray and S. L. Johnson, “The Clinical Significance of Creativity in Bipolar Disorder,” Clinical Psychology Review 30 (2010): 721–32.

  induce elevated mood: See, for example, a review of this literature in B. A. Hennessey and T. M. Amabile, “Creativity,” Annual Review of Psychology 61 (2010): 569–98. A Dutch meta-analysis of sixty-six studies with more than seven thousand research participants found that positive moods, especially positive mood states that are activating, lead to more creativity than neutral moods: M. Baas, C. K. W. De Dreu, and B. A. Nijstad, “A Meta-Analysis of 25 Years of Mood-Creativity Research: Hedonic Tone, Activation, or Regulatory Focus?,” Psychological Bulletin 134 (2008): 779–806.

  scientists recently showed: S. Ramirez, X. Liu, C. J. MacDonald, et al., “Activating Positive Memory Engrams Suppresses Depression-like Behaviour,” Nature 522 (2015): 335–39.

  drugs that decrease dopamine: For a review of the pharmacological treatment of mania: F. K. Goodwin and K. R. Jamison, Manic-Depressive Illness; Stephen M. Stahl, Stahl’s Essential Psychopharmacology: Neuroscientific Basis and Practical Applications, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  dopamine-enhancing drugs: R. Inzelberg reviewed more than twenty articles: R. Inzelberg, “The Awakening of Artistic Creativity and Parkinson’s Disease,” Behavioral Neuroscience 127 (2013): 256–61.

  “is predominantly exalted”: Emil Kraepelin, Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia, 56.

  Among adolescents: T. A. Greenwood et al., “Genome-Wide Association Study of Irritable Versus Elated Mania”; A. Stringaris et al., “Dimensions of Manic Symptoms in Youth.”

  The exuberant manic patients: A. Stringaris et al., “Dimensions of Manic Symptoms in Youth.”

  “Madmen are not as Melancholicks”: Thomas Willis, Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes Which Is That of the Vital and Sensitive of Man, trans. S. Pordage (London: Thomas Dring, 1683), 255.

  Mania is tied as well: D. Schuldberg, “Schizotypal and Hypomanic Traits, Creativity, and Psychological Health,” Creativity Research Journal 3 (1990): 218–30; K. R. Jamison, Touched with Fire; G. Murray and S. L. Johnson, “The Clinical Significance of Creativity in Bipolar Disorder,” 721–32.

  Stanford researchers: C. M. Strong, C. Nowakowska, C. M. Santosa, et al., “Temperament-Creativity Relationships in Mood Disorder Patients, Healthy Controls and Highly Creative Individuals,” Journal of Affective Disorders 100 (2007): 41–48; S. Srivastava and T. A. Ketter, “The Link Between Bipolar Disorders and Creativity: Evidence from Personality and Temperament Studies,” Current Psychiatry Research 12 (2010): 522–30.

  “of a fibre irritable and delicate”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate,” Nature and Selected Essays, 387.

  an underlying hyperthymic temperament: S. Kesebir, S. Vahip, F. Akdeniz, et al., “Affective Temperaments as Measured by TEMPS-A in Patients with Bipolar I Disorder and Their First-Degree Relatives: A Controlled Study,” Journal of Affective Disorders 85 (2005): 127–33; M. V. Mendlowicz, G. Jean-Louis, J. R. Kelsoe, and H. S. Akiskal, “A Comparison of Recovered Bipolar Patients, Healthy Relatives of Bipolar Probands, and Normal Controls Using the Short TEMPS-A,” Journal of Affective Disorders 85 (2005): 147–51; T. A. Greenwood, H. S. Akiskal, K. K. Akiskal, and J. R. Kelsoe, “Genome-wide Association Study of Temperament in Bipolar Disorder Reveals Significant Associations to Three Novel Loci,” Biological Psychiatry 72 (2012): 303–10.

  “If I’m ill”: John D. Campbell, Manic-Depressive Disease.

  “Patient says he ‘thinks’ ”: Robert Lowell’s medical record, Massachusetts Mental Health Center, December 1957.

  half of those who have been manic: A review of 5,973 patients with a history of mania (thirty-three studies) found that 53 percent had a history of delusions (31 percent had had grandiose delusions, 29 percent persecutory/paranoid delusions). F. K. Goodwin and K. R. Jamison, Manic-Depressive Illness, 53–60.

  In children with bipolar I disorder: R. Tillman, B. Geller, T. Klages, et al., “Psychotic Phenomena in 257 Young Children and Adolescents with Bipolar I Disorder: Delusions and Hallucinations (Benign and Pathological),” Bipolar Disorders 10 (2008): 45–55.

  Delusions during mania: E. Kraepelin, Manic-Depressive Insanity; G. Winokur, P. J. Clayton, and T. Reich, Manic-Depressive Illness (St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1969); Y. Lerner, “The Subjective Experience of Mania,” in R. H. Belmaker and H. M. Van Praag, eds., Mania: An Evolving Concept (New York: Spectrum Publications, 1980), 77–88; F. K. Goodwin and K. R. Jamison, Manic-Depressive Illness.

  “fulfill a divine mission”: Emil Kraepelin, Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia, 68–69.

  progressive changes in the brain: See reviews of the literature in V. Maletic and C. Raison, “Integrated Neurobiology of Bipolar Disorder,” Frontiers in Psychiatry 5 (2014): 1–24; C. Abé, C.-J. Ekman, C. Sellgren, et al., “Manic Episodes Are Related to Changes in Frontal Cortex: A Longitudinal Neuroimaging Study of Bipolar Disorder I,” Brain 138 (2015): 1–9.

  the broken plate: F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up,” 45.

  “It is hard to say”: Interview with Jeanne Purcell, Bangor Daily News, August 8, 1967.

  “What can you do after”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Peter Taylor, March 15, 1958, Letters, 317.

  “new and wonderful talents”: Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind, 153–54.

  “The foundations of the earth”: Isaiah 24:18.

  “Life seemed to be there”: Frederick Seidel, “The Art of Poetry: Robert Lowell,” Writers at Work: The “Paris Review” Interviews, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (New York: Viking, 1963), 336–68.

  “He could have settled”: Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 117.

  12. WORDS MEAT-HOOKED FROM THE LIVING STEER

  “The needle that prods”: Al Alvarez, “Robert Lowell in Conversation,” Observer, July 21, 1963.

  “somehow lift the great sail”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, April 14, 1962, Letters, 408.

  “we walk the same sidewalks”: Robert Lowell, “Hawthorne’s Pegasus,” Collected Prose, 162.

  “Imagination catches us”: Ibid.

  “wanted to see things straight”: Ibid., 163.

  “even people of imagination”: Ibid., 164.

  “Let me warn you”: Percival Lowell, The Solar System: Six Lectures Delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in December 1902 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 71.

  “The arts do not progress”: Robert Lowell, “Robert Frost,” Collected Prose, 9.

  “There is something inside”: Robert Lowell interview with Jonathan Miller, BBC program, “The Lively Arts: Robert Lowell,” March 9, 1965.

  “I think it must be sort of”: Ibid.

  “While you
were playing your music”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Harriet Lowell, July 30, 1968, Robert Lowell Papers, HRC.

  “I see these winds”: Robert Lowell, “These Winds,” Collected Poems, 608. In “Soft Wood,” ten years earlier, Lowell had described a wind that was without direction or inspiration: “there is no utility or inspiration,” he wrote, “in the wind smashing without direction.” Collected Poems, 370.

  “how often”: Robert Lowell, “These Winds,” Collected Poems, 608.

  “Tops of the midnight trees”: Robert Lowell, “Redcliffe Square: 2. Window,” Collected Poems, 646.

  “groping for trout”: Robert Lowell, “The Serpent,” Collected Poems, 648.

  “It is the future generation”: The epigraph to “ ‘To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,’ ” Collected Poems, 190, is a “spliced quotation from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea.” Note by Frank Bidart in Collected Poems, 1045.

  “It’s not much fun”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Peter Taylor, March 15, 1958, Letters, 317.

  “Surely, there’s some terrible flaw”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Hardwick, February 5, 1965, Hardwick Papers, HRC.

  “The patient has had”: Robert Lowell’s medical records, Massachusetts Mental Health Center, December 1957.

  “Lowell felt that the early stages”: Eric Linnolt, M.D., interview with the author, June 28, 2012.

  “coincided with the patient’s beginning”: Robert Lowell’s medical records, Payne Whitney Clinic, September 1949.

  “a little too excited”: Robert Lowell’s medical records, Payne Whitney Clinic, 1954.

  “might be having another manic episode”: Robert Lowell’s medical records, Boston State Hospital, December 1957.

  “From February until April”: Robert Lowell’s medical records, Massachusetts Mental Health Center, December 1957.

  “I write my best poetry”: Robert Lowell to his London physician, Dr. Paul Brass. Dr. Brass was interviewed about Lowell’s November 1975 hospitalization at the Priory by Nancy Schoenberger. Quoted in Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001), 206.