“After much irresolution”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, May 5, 1955, Words in Air, 158.
“He appeared to be elated”: Peter Taylor, “Robert Trail [sic] Spence Lowell 1917–1977,” Ploughshares 5 (1979): 74–81.
Behold, I make all things: Revelation 21:5.
“I saw my city in the Scales”: Robert Lowell, “Where the Rainbow Ends,” Complete Poems, 69.
“The family graveyard”: Elizabeth Hardwick to Mary McCarthy, October 2, 1977, Vassar.
“the black brook”: Robert Lowell, “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium,” Collected Prose, 348.
“Grandfather and I”: Robert Lowell, “Dunbarton,” Collected Poems, 169.
“the immortal is scraped”: Robert Lowell, “Endings,” Collected Poems, 760.
“But there is”: Linda Charlton, “Voznesensky’s Elegy at Lowell’s Grave,” New York Times, October 15, 1977.
“I still hear you”: Andrei Voznesensky, “Family Graveyard,” trans. William Jay Smith and Fred Starr, New York Times, October 15, 1977.
“You were our night ferry”: Seamus Heaney, “Elegy,” in Field Work (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 24.
“Frank [Bidart] read me”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Elizabeth Bishop, August 16, 1978, Vassar.
“I can make out the rigging”: Elizabeth Bishop, “North Haven,” in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 188–89. Lowell had written in “Fall Weekend at Milgate” (Collected Poems, 659):
Nature, like philosophers, has one plot,
only good for repeating what it does well:
life emerges from wood and life from life.
15. HE IS OUT OF BOUNDS NOW
“On a thousand”: Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead,” Collected Poems, 377.
“The dead have no need”: The Reverend Peter J. Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard Divinity School and Pusey Minister at Harvard Memorial Church, March 2, 1978, in The Harvard Crimson, March 3, 1978.
“exerted a giant’s pressure”: Robert Fitzgerald, “The Things of the Eye,” 111.
He had written about only four places: Ian Hamilton, “A Conversation with Robert Lowell,” The Review 26 ( Summer 1971): 10.
“The old South Boston Aquarium stands”: Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead,” Collected Poems, 376–78.
“childhood memories”: Robert Lowell, introductory notes for his statement on “For the Union Dead,” read at the Boston Arts Festival, June 1960, Robert Lowell Papers, Houghton Library, 2300, 2571.
“may be about a child maturing”: Ibid.
“We’re decaying”: Robert Lowell, “In Bounds,” Newsweek, October 12, 1964, 122.
“Perhaps because his own existence”: Randall Jarrell, book jacket comments for Robert Lowell’s Life Studies.
William Bradford had written: “I have been happy, in my first times, to see, and with much comfort to enjoy, the blessed fruits of this sweet communion, but it is now a part of my misery in old age, to find and feel the decay…and with grief and sorrow of heart to lament and bewail the same.” William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 33.
“was as crisp, bracing, and colorful”: Robert Lowell, “New England and Further,” Collected Prose, 181.
“I ponder on the railing”: Robert Lowell, “At the Indian Killer’s Grave,” Collected Poems, 58.
“Here, also, are the veterans”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Gray Champion” in Twice-Told Tales (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 3–10. Lowell changed Hawthorne’s wording in small ways.
“until every drop of blood”: Abraham Lincoln, second inaugural address, March 4, 1865: “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’ ” U.S. National Archives & Records Administration.
“Let justice be done”: “We know the redemption must come,” said John Quincy Adams, speaking to an audience of black citizens in Pittsburgh in 1843. “But whether in peace or blood, LET IT COME.” Later, in the House of Representatives, he added, “Though it cost the blood of millions of white men, let it come. Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.” Joshua Reed Giddings, History of the Rebellion: Its Authors and Causes (New York: Follet, Foster & Co., 1864).
“The arm of the slave”: Frederick Douglass, “Men of Color, to Arms!,” speech at Rochester, New York, March 2, 1863, in Richard Benson and Lincoln Kirstein, Lay This Laurel: An Album on the Saint-Gaudens Memorial on Boston Common Honoring Black and White Men Together Who Served the Union Cause with Robert Gould Shaw and Died with Him July 18, 1863 (New York: Eakins Press, 1973).
America, he believed: Letter from Robert Lowell to the editors, The Village Voice, November 19, 1964, Letters, 453.
“The more I think”: Letter from Robert Gould Shaw to Annie Haggerty Shaw, June 1, 1863, in Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, ed. Russell Duncan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992).
“Col. Shaw, from the beginning”: Letter from James Henry Gooding to the editors of the New Bedford Mercury, August 16, 1863 published on August 29, 1863.
“manner was more unbending”: Ibid.
“A long line of phosphorescent light”: Clara Barton quoted in Percy Harold Epler, The Life of Clara Barton (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 80.
“The dead and wounded”: Lieutenant Iredell Jones, quoted in Lay This Laurel.
“The thousand little sand-hills”: Letter from Clara Barton to Theodore Parker, December 9, 1863, in William E. Barton, The Life of Clara Barton: Founder of the American Red Cross (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), 261.
“We can imagine no holier place”: Letter from Francis George Shaw to Lincoln Stone, the regimental surgeon of Robert Gould Shaw, 1863, in Lorien Foote, Seeking the One Great Remedy: Francis George Shaw and Nineteenth-Century Reform (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003).
“There on horseback”: Oration by William James, “Exercises at the Dedication of the Monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry, May 31, 1897” (Boston: Municipal Printing Office, 1897), 41.
“common and gregarious”: Ibid., 50–51.
“Watchman, tell us”: Booker T. Washington, “Exercises at the Declaration of the Monument,” 60.
“You have immortalized”: Quoted in Burke Wilkinson, Uncommon Clay: The Life and Works of Augustus Saint Gaudens (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 286.
“You are a great American writer”: Letter from Elizabeth Hardwick to Robert Lowell, June 26, 1970, Harriet Lowell.
“You drank America”: Seamus Heaney, “Elegy,” 24.
“I love my country”: Letter from Robert Lowell to George Santayana, February 2, 1948, Letters, 93.
“Where is America?”: Ian Hamilton, “A Conversation with Robert Lowell,” 10–29. The published version of this interview quotes Lowell as saying “it streams through my eyes”; the original interview reads “seeps.”
The color of his blood: Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, October 7, 1972, Words in Air, 729.
“I see now that”: Letter from Charles Russell Lowell, Jr., to Josephine Shaw Lowell, July 28, 1863, in Edward W. Emerson, ed., Life and Letters of Charles Russell Lowell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907), 288–89.
“most like to have known”: Jane Howard, “Applause for a Prize Poet,” 58.
“Twelve horses killed under him”: Robert Lowell, “Colonel Charles Russell Lowell 1835–64,” Collected Poems, 485.
“He had, gave”: Ibid.
Sixteen times and more: Sidney Nolan, interview with Ian Hamilton, 1980, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Li
brary.
“the hum outliving”: James Russell Lowell, “The Darkened Mind,” 427.
“The bells cry”: Robert Lowell, “Mary Winslow,” Collected Poems, 28.
APPENDICES
“It was answered”: William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 27.
“My relationship with Mr. Lowell”: Letter from Viola Bernard to Ian Hamilton, July 2, 1980, Ian Hamilton Papers, British Library.
“I sleep sitting up”: Letter from Robert Lowell to Caroline Blackwood, January 31, 1977, Letters, 663.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Carcanet Press Limited: Excerpt letter from D. Davie to R. Lowell, June 24, 1967, originally published in Collected Poems by Donald Davie. Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press Limited, Manchester, UK.
Diane P. Cherot: Excerpts of a letter from Curtis Prout, M.D. addressed to Robert Lowell, dated May 13, 1975 (Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas). Reprinted by permission of Diane P. Cherot.
The Estate of George Sassoon: Excerpt from “Repression of War Experience” by Siegfried Sassoon, copyright © Siegfried Sassoon. Reprinted by permission of The Estate of George Sassoon.
The Estate of Stephen Spender: Excerpts from unpublished letters by Stephen Spender (British Library), copyright © Stephen Spender. Reprinted by permission of The Estate of Stephen Spender.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC: Excerpts from Collected Poems by Robert Lowell, copyright © 2003 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell; excerpts from Collected Prose by Robert Lowell, copyright © 1987 by Caroline Lowell, Harriet Lowell, and Sheridan Lowell; excerpts from The Letters of Robert Lowell edited by Saskia Hamilton, copyright © 2005 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell; excerpts from Notebook: Revised and Expanded Edition by Robert Lowell, copyright © 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970 by Robert Lowell, copyright renewed 1998 by Harriet Lowell; excerpts from Prometheus Bound, derived from Aeschylus by Robert Lowell, copyright © 1967, 1969 by Robert Lowell; excerpts from Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton. Writings of Elizabeth Bishop copyright © 2008 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Robert Lowell letters copyright © Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. Compilation copyright © 2008 by Thomas J. Travisano; excerpt of “North Haven” from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, copyright © 2011 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust, Publisher’s Note and compilation copyright © 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Harriet Lowell: Excerpts from responses to interviews, comments, and materials written by Harriet Lowell; excerpts from published and unpublished letters, notebooks, diaries, and draft manuscripts of Robert Lowell; excerpts from medical records of Robert Lowell; and the published and unpublished letters, articles, and notes of Elizabeth Hardwick, and interviews with Ian Hamilton and others. Reprinted by permission of Harriet Lowell.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company: Excerpt of “Elegy in the Classroom” from To Bedlam and Part Way Back by Anne Sexton, copyright © 1960 by Anne Sexton, copyright renewed 1988 by Linda G. Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Lowell Observatory Archives: Excerpts of letter from W. Louise Leonard to T. T. J. See, December 19, 1912, and letter from W. Louise Leonard to V. M. Slipher, December 31, 1912. Reprinted by permission of Lowell Observatory Archives.
The Random House Group Limited: Excerpt from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Originally published by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of The Random House Group Limited, in 2011. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
Russell & Volkening, Inc.: Excerpt of letter from Jean Stafford to Caroline and Allen Tate, n.d., 1943 [Princeton]; excerpt of letter from Jean Stafford to William Mock, November 27, 1938 [Dartmouth College Library]; excerpt of letter from Jean Stafford to James Hightower, September 9, 1941 [University of Colorado]; excerpts of letters from Jean Stafford to Peter Taylor, February 11, 1944, and July 12, 1944 [Vanderbilt]; and excerpt from “An Influx of Poets” by Jean Stafford, originally published in The New Yorker (November 6, 1978), copyright © 1978 by Jean Stafford. Excerpt of letter from Peter Taylor to Robie Macaulay, March 1941 [Vanderbilt]; excerpt of Church of the Advent notes by Peter Taylor; and excerpt of “Robert Lowell” from radio program BBC Lively Arts. Reprinted by permission of Russell & Volkening, Inc., as agents for the authors.
Viking Books: Excerpts from The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles, translation copyright © 1996 by Robert Fagles; and excerpts from The Aeneid by Virgil, translated by Robert Fagles, translation copyright © 2006 by Robert Fagles. Reprinted by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
1 Photo Gisèle Freund/IMEC/Fonds MCC.
2 Original steel engraving, hand colored, 1851. From A History of the Massachusetts General Hospital by N. I. Bowditch.
3 Robert Lowell’s signature from the author’s copy of a signed edition of Lord Weary’s Castle.
4 Image reproduced with permission of Bedford Whaling Museum.
5 Courtesy of Judith Parker.
6 Lowell House, Harvard University. Photograph by author.
7 Daguerreotype Collection, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-109922.
8 McLean Asylum ledger. Photograph by author.
9 Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
10 Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
11 Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
12 Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
13 Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
14 Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
15 Courtesy of Harriet Lowell.
16 Allen Tate Papers, Princeton University Library.
17 Table by the author.
18 Courtesy of Harriet Lowell.
19 Allen Tate Papers, Princeton University Library.
20 Courtesy of Harriet Lowell.
21 Courtesy of Harriet Lowell.
22 McLean Asylum ledger. Photograph by author.
23 Courtesy of Luca Galuzzi.
24 Figure by the author.
25 Courtesy of Harriet Lowell.
26 Courtesy of Medical Center Archives of New York–Presbyterian/Weill Cornell.
27 Photograph by Robert Gardner. First published in AGNI 75 (2012).
28 Drawing by Alain Moreau, owned by author.
29 Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Libraries.
30 Photo courtesy of Marion Ettlinger.
31 Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
32 Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) letter, MS 2958.3107, The New-York Historical Society.
33 Photograph by Robert Gardner. First published in AGNI 75 (2012).
34 Illustration by Frank Parker. Courtesy of Judith Parker.
35 Table by the author (updated and revised by K. R. Jamison, in Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007]).
36 Table by the author.
37 Abnormal flow of thinking: flight of ideas. In Sims’ Symptoms in the Mind: An Introduction to Descriptive Psychopathology, 4th ed., ed. Femi Oyebode (Saunders Elsevier, 2008), p. 157, figure 9.2. Copyright © Elsevier.
38 Photograph by Shoshannah White Studio.
39 Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
40 Courtesy of McLean Hospital Archives.
41 Stan Grossfeld/Getty Images.
42 Courtesy of King’s Chapel.
43 © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
44 Courtesy of Evgenia Citkowitz.
45 Photograph by Tom Traill. Used courtesy of the photographer.
46 Courtesy of Harriet Lowell.
47 Courtesy of Evgenia Citkowitz.
48 Courtesy of Harriet Lowell.
49 Courtesy of Harriet Lowell
50 Courtesy of Harriet Lowell.
51 Photograph by James T. Campen. Used courtesy of the photographer.
52 Photograph by James T. Campen. Used courtesy of the photographer.
53 Photo © Steve Schapiro (Life magazine, February 19, 1965).
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kay Redfield Jamison is the Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders, professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and codirector of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center. She is also honorary professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and the author of the national best sellers An Unquiet Mind and Night Falls Fast, as well as Touched with Fire, Exuberance, and Nothing Was the Same. Dr. Jamison is the coauthor of the standard medical text on bipolar illness, Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression. Her scientific and literary honors include the Lewis Thomas Prize, the Sarnat Prize from the National Academy of Medicine, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She is married to Thomas Traill, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
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Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character Page 59
