Robert Lowell is not difficult to represent as the mad poet and justified sinner of the Romantic heritage. He is the dual personality who breaks the rules, kicks over the traces: he did this in the course of a series of manic highs which came and went from maturity, if not before, until the end of his life in 1977 at the age of 60. He goes up and he comes down. He was a man, as he said himself, of 'tumbles and leaps', a man of extremes, of moods and moments, and of the moment, of nerves, fresh starts and escapes, whose illness and convulsive life gained access to, if they were not inseparable from, an art nerved to resist them. He was a bear, a bull, a threat to those who knew him. 'A born joiner,' said his second wife, but more of a born leaver, a disjoiner and divorcer. He was a maker of poems but also their unmaker and negator, falling into a habit of revision which became a compulsion: so that the scholarship of his verse bears an element of anguish, which sends its shadow before it into the 21st century.

LRB 19 May 1983 | PDF Download