“[W]e totter off the strewn stage”: Robert Lowell, “Artist’s Model,” Collected Poems, 683.
“Art just isn’t worth that much”: Letter from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, March 21, 1972, Words in Air, 708.
“The writer’s only responsibility”: Jean Stein, “William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12,” Paris Review 12 (Spring 1956).
“I couldn’t bear”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, April 4, 1972, Letters, 613.
“wonderful”: Ibid. Elizabeth Bishop writes in the letter that the poems in The Dolphin are “wonderful poetry,” “magnificent,” “honest,” “great poetry” (she emphasizes that she has never used the word “great” before).
“Lizzie is not dead”: Letter from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, March 21, 1972, Words in Air, 708.
“mixture of fact & fiction”: Ibid.
“It is not being ‘gentle’ ”: Ibid.
“cruel invasion”: Stanley Kunitz, “The Sense of a Life.”
“tear Elizabeth apart”: Letter from William Alfred to Robert Lowell, March 12, 1972, Houghton Library.
“dear wystan”: Quoted by Lowell in his letter to William Alfred, March 20, 1972, Letters, 587.
“cannibal-poet”: Donald Hall, “Robert Lowell and the Literature Industry,” Georgia Review 32 (1978): 7–12.
“What does one say”: Adrienne Rich, “Carydid: A Column,” American Poetry Review (September–October 1973): 42–43.
“I did not see them”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, March 28, 1972, Letters, 590.
“The problem of making the poem”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, April 4, 1972, Letters, 591.
“How can I want to hurt?”: Ibid.
“a mixture of quotes”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Robert Giroux, July 18, 1973, Letters, 614.
“Lizzie didn’t come out badly”: Steven Aronson, “Sophisticated Lady,” 148.
“I don’t know what”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell, April 9, 1972, Harriet Lowell.
“the reality was disturbing”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Giroux, July 5, 1973, Harriet Lowell.
“He used and misquoted her letters”: Harriet Lowell, correspondence with the author, April 2012 and December 2015.
“She minded his use”: Ibid.
“I’m sorry I brought this on you”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Hardwick, July 12, 1973, Letters, 612.
“On the evidence”: Douglas Dunn, “Infinite Mischief—Lowell’s Life,” Encounter 6 (September–October 1983): 75.
“like no one else”: Elizabeth Hardwick, quoted in Richard Locke, “Conversation on a Book.”
“We had one hope”: Caroline Blackwood, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1979, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“Cal was still walking around”: Ibid.
“mad as the vexed sea”: Shakespeare, King Lear, act 4, scene 3, Folger edition.
“adored English hardware stores”: Caroline Blackwood, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1979, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“wandering out on the lawn”: Jonathan Raban, correspondence with the author, October 21, 2016.
“They called him Professor”: Seamus Heaney, “Gulliver in Lilliput: Remembering Robert Lowell,” speech delivered at Harvard in 1987 on the tenth anniversary of Lowell’s death, reprinted in The Norton Book of Friendship, ed. Eudora Welty and Ronald A. Sharp (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 547–48.
recalls the nightmare: John Julius Norwich, correspondence with the author, November 14, 2010.
“sad, mad event”: Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), 216.
“looking absolutely wild”: Charles Monteith, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1980, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“[o]ur ears put us in touch”: Robert Lowell, “Home,” Collected Poems, 824–25.
“At visiting hours”: Ibid., 825.
“I wish I could die”: Robert Lowell’s medical records, Payne Whitney Clinic, 1954.
“absolutely no future”: Dido Merwin, quoted by Caroline Blackwood, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1979, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“I never know when”: Caroline Blackwood, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1979, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“I did always worry”: Ibid.
“I am weighed down”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Frank Bidart, February 15, 1976, Letters, 644.
“I can’t really function”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Blair Clark, March 4, 1976, Letters, 645.
“I’ve been sixteen times”: Sidney Nolan, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1980, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“I’d never drown myself”: Jill Neville, Fall-Girl (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 131–32.
effective in preventing suicide: See references in chapter 8 that document the efficacy of lithium in preventing suicide.
“Do I deserve credit”: Robert Lowell, “Suicide,” Collected Poems, 725.
“One light, two lights”: Ibid., 724–25.
“At visiting hours”: Robert Lowell, “Home,” Collected Poems, 825.
“I don’t need conversation”: Robert Lowell, “The Withdrawal,” Collected Poems, 783.
“I always felt it was my fault”: Caroline Blackwood, interview with Ian Hamilton, Ian Hamilton Papers, 1979, British Library.
“It’s like someone becoming an animal”: Ibid.
“ ‘Supposing I go mad’ ”: Ibid.
“more wild, more destructive”: Frank Bidart, interview with Ian Hamilton, Ian Hamilton Papers, 1981.
“At the sick times”: Robert Lowell, “Runaway,” Collected Poems, 814.
“And us?”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Caroline Blackwood, April 22, 1977, Letters, 667.
“I don’t know what to say”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Caroline Blackwood, April 14, 1977, Letters, 667.
“Us? Aren’t we too heady”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Caroline Blackwood, April 19, 1977, Letters, 667.
“I am afraid of your visit”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Caroline Blackwood, May 3, 1977, Letters, 668.
Lowell wanted peace: Blair Clark’s notes, November 25, 1976, HRC.
He told Grey Gowrie: Grey Gowrie, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1980, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“He was very clear”: Ibid.
“life with her was impossible”: Helen Vendler, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1981, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“unbelievably grateful and relieved”: Frank Bidart, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1981, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“There is no great renewed romance”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy, June 15, 1977, Vassar.
“She said she was unsure”: Harriet Lowell, correspondence with the author, April 2012.
“faced the kingdom of the mad”: Robert Lowell, “Man and Wife,” Collected Poems, 189.
“I feel broken by all conversation”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Caroline Blackwood, July 17, 1977, Letters, 671.
“bright as the morning star”: Robert Lowell, “Mermaid 3,” Collected Poems, 666.
“in the photo of you”: Ibid.
“The passion and grief”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy, May 10, 1980, Vassar.
“I think there was more openness”: Frank Bidart, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1982, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“Out of your wreckage”: Robert Lowell, “Runaway,” Collected Poems, 814.
14. BLEAK-BONED WITH SURVIVAL
“The line must terminate”: Robert Lowell, “Fishnet,” Collected Poems, 645.
“that of a man moving”: Robert Lowell, “Robert Frost,” Collected Prose, 10.
“Sing to me of the man”: Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, book 1 (New York: Penguin, 1996), 77.
“came piling on”: Homer, The Iliad, trans. Rob
ert Fagles, book 3, 136.
grace and sense: “What grace you give your words and what good sense within! / You have told your story with all a singer’s skill, / the miseries you endured.” Homer, The Odyssey, book 11, 261.
“life, energy, and enthusiasm”: Robert Lowell, “War: A Justification.”
“reach aesthetic perfection”: Robert Lowell notes on The Odyssey, 1935 notebook, Houghton Library.
“grown bleak-boned”: Robert Lowell, “Ulysses and Circe,” Collected Poems, 717.
“contained a God”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Ezra Pound, May 2, 1936, Letters, 4.
“It is hard for me to imagine”: Stanley Kunitz, “Talk with Robert Lowell.”
“grown wise in seafaring”: Robert T. S. Lowell, “A Raft That No Man Made,” in Atlantic Tales: A Collection of Stories from the Atlantic Monthly (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867). Lowell’s story was first published in 1862.
“Odysseus journeys home”: Homer, The Odyssey, book 5, 153. See also book 1, “Odysseus journeys home—the exile must return!,” 80.
“convoy of the gods”: Homer, The Odyssey, book 5, 153.
“a lashed, makeshift raft”: Ibid.
“She is a snipper-off’er”: Robert Lowell, “Ulysses and Circe,” Collected Poems, 716.
“Young / he made strategic choices”: Ibid., 715.
“the cycle of Greek radiance”: Robert Lowell, “Epics,” Collected Prose, 214.
“England didn’t have real summers”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, July 12, 1976, Letters, 655.
“A big house in England”: Robert Lowell, entry in his notebook for January 31, 1973, Harriet Lowell.
“this totally American man”: Esther Brooks, “Remembering Cal,” 43.
“I hope”: Robert Lowell, “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays on Me,” Collected Poems, 993.
“I willed it”: Homer, The Odyssey, book 13, 296.
“In silence”: Ibid.
“He suddenly looked”: Kathleen Spivack, With Robert Lowell and His Circle, 310.
His “erratic aloofness”: Ibid., 211.
his suffering had made him: Peter Levi, “Remembering Lowell,” Listener 98 (September 22, 1977): 380.
Blood smells of iron: Adam Nicolson, Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides.
“Why don’t they ever say”: Helen Vendler, “Robert Lowell’s Last Days and Last Poems,” in Robert Lowell: A Tribute, 161.
“most heartbreaking”: Robert Lowell, “Randall Jarrell,” Collected Prose, 91.
“broken-hearted lions”: Robert Lowell, “For George Santayana,” Collected Poems, 156.
“heartbreaking”: Letter from Robert Lowell to John Berryman, November 5, 1966, University of Minnesota.
“I expected him to choose Eliot”: Grey Gowrie, “Robert Lowell: Image and Reflection,” Agni 75 (2012): 190.
“Looking back now”: Esther Brooks, “Remembering Cal,” 43–44.
“America and teaching at Harvard”: Ibid., 44.
“the pioneer going into”: Dudley Young, “Talk with Robert Lowell.”
“Keep Ithaka always”: C. P. Cavafy, “Ithaka,” in Collected Poems, trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, ed. George Savidis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).
“In the midst of life”: The Burial Service, The Book of Common Prayer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1848).
“I miss the long roll of years”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, July 30, 1968, Words in Air, 644.
“when I look inside”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, September 5, 1968, Letters, 506.
“The things that cannot be done twice!”: Ibid.
“I wake up thinking”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Peter Taylor, June 27, 1960, Vanderbilt.
“It’s hard to get used to knowing”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Mary McCarthy, August 7, 1963, Letters, 430.
“Oh, oh, oh, how time”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, October 27, 1963, Letters, 439.
“Each season we get older”: Letter from Robert Lowell to William Meredith, December 6, 1969, Connecticut College.
“I still feel I can reach up”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, September 11, 1970, Letters, 544.
“Is dying harder”: Robert Lowell, “Last Night,” Collected Poems, 601.
“It’s the twinges of mortality”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, May 3, 1973, Words in Air, 746.
“I climb the ladder, knowing”: Robert Lowell, “Through the Night,” Notebook 1967–68, 46.
“thing one writes for oneself”: Robert Schumann, quoted in Waldo Selden Pratt and Charles Newell Boyd, eds., Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 4 (Ann Arbor. MI: Macmillan, 1937).
“the more you realize”: James Atlas, correspondence with the author, May 5, 2013.
“What we want to say”: Al Alvarez, “A Talk with Robert Lowell,” 41.
“His briefcase which he carried”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy [1980?], Vassar.
“isn’t even that”: Robert Lowell, notebook entry, January 11, 1973, Harriet Lowell.
“the hungry future”: Robert Lowell, “The Withdrawal,” Collected Poems, 784.
“I’ve been thinking”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Peter and Eleanor Taylor, September 4, 1976, Vanderbilt.
“Those blessèd structures”: Robert Lowell, “Epilogue,” Collected Poems, 838.
“disarming openness”: Helen Vendler, “Robert Lowell’s Last Days and Last Poems,” 157–58.
“without hysteria”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Peter Taylor, September 11, 1975, Vanderbilt.
“to hold a shield”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, March 4, 1976, Letters, 645.
“roles he played”: Marjorie Perloff, “Robert Lowell: ‘Fearlessly holding back nothing,’ ” Washington Post, September 25, 1977.
“Only when we read”: William Pritchard, “Collected Poems: The Whole Lowell,” New York Times Book Review, June 29, 2003.
“Ask for no Orphean lute”: Robert Lowell, “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” Collected Poems, 14.
“I ask for a natural death”: Robert Lowell, “Death of a Critic,” Collected Poems, 758.
“I have no hope”: Robert Lowell, “Agamemnon,” The Oresteia of Aeschylus (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978), 31.
“Yet how much we carry away”: Robert Lowell, notebook entry, January 28, 1973, Harriet Lowell.
“destroying her”: Caroline Blackwood, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1979, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“The great circuit of the stars”: Robert Lowell, “Leaving America for England: 4. No Telling,” Collected Poems, 697.
He was in “awful” shape: Frank Bidart, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1981, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
He was “just nervous”: Ibid.
“After my cardiograph came out irregular”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Caroline Blackwood, February 28, 1977, Letters, 665.
He told the attending physician: Robert Lowell was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital on February 1, 1977, and discharged on February 9, 1977. Appendix 3 provides information on his medical condition at that time and a summary of the findings from his earlier medical records.
“A weak clamor”: Robert Lowell, “Phillips House Revisited,” Collected Poems, 798.
“very flat affect”: Nursing notes from Robert Lowell’s hospitalization at Massachusetts General Hospital, February 1 to February 9, 1977.
“Thank you for referring Mr. Lowell”: Letter from Timothy Guiney, M.D., to Charles Weingarten, M.D., February 16, 1977, Massachusetts General Hospital medical records.
“Cal’s tone was quite flat”: Blair Clark, notes for an unpublished memoir, May 8, 1977, Blair Clark Papers, HRC.
“were quite nice to each other”: Frank Bidart, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1981, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“tired and mela
ncholy”: Letter from William Styron to Ian Hamilton, July 1, 1981, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“He lived quietly”: Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1982, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“had been his life”: Ibid.
“I would wish to live”: Robert Lowell, “Loneliness,” Collected Poems, 852.
“We were / so by ourselves”: Ibid.
“It has been much more painful”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy, October 2, 1977, Vassar.
“Last year”: Robert Lowell, “Summer Tides,” Collected Poems, 853.
“My wooden beach-ladder”: Ibid.
“He seemed a very lonely figure”: Frank Bidart, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1981, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“That’s how we’re buried”: Helen Vendler, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1981, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
Lowell was extremely restless: Caroline Blackwood, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1979, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“sheer torture”: Elizabeth Hardwick, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1982, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“drifts with the wild ice”: Robert Lowell, “The Mouth of the Hudson,” Collected Poems, 328.
“Christ, / may I die”: Robert Lowell, “Fragment,” Collected Poems, 988.
“My heart longs to be home”: Homer, The Odyssey, book 10, 245–46.
“I remember once”: Blair Clark, “On Robert Lowell,” Harvard Advocate 113 (1979): 111.
“The famous American poet”: Stanley Kunitz, “The Sense of a Life.”
“Robert Lowell, who died”: Anonymous, “Robert Lowell: Leading American Poet,” The Times (London), September 14, 1977.
“He is dead now”: Michael Ryan, “Lowell Cast Glow on Boston,” Boston Herald American, September 14, 1977.
“Robert Lowell followed”: Eugene McCarthy, “At the Moment of a Poet’s Death, Stand Up and Be Quiet,” Washington Star, September 18, 1977.
“A sense of loss”: Hilton Kramer, “The Loss of a Poet.”
“The Pulitzer Prize judges”: Robert Taylor, “Lowell’s Majesty,” Boston Globe, September 14, 1977.
“Robert Lowell’s painful”: William McPherson, “Lowell: A Final Chapter,” Washington Post, September 17, 1977.
“happy to report”: Letter from the Reverend Whitney Hale to Robert Lowell, November 12, 1955, Houghton Library.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 58
