It’s the birthday of the prominent 20th century poet Robert Lowell, Jr., said by one of his friends to be “the most continuously metaphoric” person he’d ever known (Don Chiasson, “The Illness and Insight of Robert Lowell,” March 20, 2017, The New Yorker). Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder that actually caused periods of delusion in which (as the article explains) the metaphors seemed to become real.

Lowell was born in 1917 in Boston, Massachusetts, to the unhappily married Charlotte Winslow Lowell and Robert Traill Spence Lowell III. The Lowell family was both Boston Brahmin and highly literary; his great-granduncle was the Romantic poet James Russell Lowell, his distant cousin the Pulitzer-winning poet Amy Lowell, and like that. Lowell’s genius was acknowledged early on. He went to Harvard like a good Brahmin but switched to Kenyon College in Ohio, graduating in 1940 and marrying his first wife, Pulitzer-winning author Jean Stafford. He served five months for conscientious objection during WWII (even though, as his cousin Sarah Payne Stuart explains, he had tried to enlist twice: “Bobby’s life is something confusing”), and wrote about this in his poem “In the Cage,” from the collection Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), which won the Pulitzer in 1947. (Basically everyone in this post has a Pulitzer.)

Lowell had converted to Catholicism, but neither the Catholicism nor the first marriage held in the long run, and Lowell and Stafford divorced in 1948. In 1949, Lowell met Flannery O’Connor (just 24) at the Yaddo writer’s colony and became good friends; he met Elizabeth Hardwick there as well. Lowell’s bipolar disorder was still undiagnosed, and a strange episode occurred at Yaddo in which Lowell accused director Elizabeth Ames of colluding with a Communist guest being investigated by the FBI. It seems likely now that his accusations against Ames were precipitated in part by his first manic episode. The affair ended with Ames being cleared of all charges by the Yaddo board and Lowell in a padded cell having electric shock treatment. The situation grieved O’Connor “as if he had died.” Afterward he was no longer Catholic. In two months he married Hardwick and they remained married until 1972, when he married Lady Caroline Blackwood.

Lowell endured twelve hospitalizations and ongoing brutal cycles of manic-depression, yet he continued writing. His collection of 15 confessional poems and an autobiographical essay in Life Studies (1959) won a National Book Award for poetry; his poetry collection The Dolphin (1973) won a second Pulitzer. The following excerpt is from “Skunk Hour” (Life Studies):

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town….
My mind’s not right.

A car radio bleats,
‘Love, O careless Love….’ I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat…
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here- 

Lowell died in New York in 1977.

For another take on Lowell, read “‘Bobby Was a Difficult Child’: My Cousin, Robert Lowell” by Sarah Payne Stuart (Nov. 20, 1994, New York Times). (Payne also wrote My First Cousin Once Removed: Money, Madness, and the Family of Robert Lowell, 1999.) She gives an extremely funny inside view of her family and Bobby’s place in it, including a description of his funeral that could only have been written by a family member.

Have a mentally robust Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.