Robert Lowell. Bi polar and a genius and with character
Apologies. I have been away from this blog for anyone who cares, for some time.
Returning after 30 days in India, I am catching up, with the New Yorker, and found two articles of immense interest which continue a previous posting. Books. "The Mania and the Muse" Did Robert Lowell's illness shape his work? " I did not know that RL was bipolar or that it was even something which was diagnosed at this time. It makes sense about his relationship and sympathy for Elizabeth Bishop, accordingly...The piece is written by Dan Chiasson and in the New Yorker's March 20, 2017 edition, beginning on p. 94.
Joyce Carol Oates is cited as terming Lowell's condition, "his ironic dignity". Like Merwin,Lowell e wrote a letter to Ezra Pound and met him and credits him with charging his path in life in poetry. As a freshman at Harvard, he indicated he wanted Pound to be his mentor.
All this is about Kay Redfield Jamison's "groundbreaking" book, ROBERT LOWELL< SETTING THE RIVER ON FIRE: A STUDY OF GENIUS, MANIA and CHARACTER.
Chiasson concludes that the "defining feature of his gift was also the source of his suffering", which is something which I have always felt about the condition of being a poetry and writing poetry, which is all about feeling and the sensibility. Jonathan Raban called Lowell the most "contiously metaphoric person"he had met.
Married to Elizabeth Hardwick, Lowell had a child with her and was hospitalized 12 x in the period of 1949-1964, during the publication of his two most important books: "Life Studies" and "for the Union Dead". I heard Lowell read on a July 4? celebration in NYC before he died from this collection.
Read the review...
.
Returning after 30 days in India, I am catching up, with the New Yorker, and found two articles of immense interest which continue a previous posting. Books. "The Mania and the Muse" Did Robert Lowell's illness shape his work? " I did not know that RL was bipolar or that it was even something which was diagnosed at this time. It makes sense about his relationship and sympathy for Elizabeth Bishop, accordingly...The piece is written by Dan Chiasson and in the New Yorker's March 20, 2017 edition, beginning on p. 94.
Joyce Carol Oates is cited as terming Lowell's condition, "his ironic dignity". Like Merwin,Lowell e wrote a letter to Ezra Pound and met him and credits him with charging his path in life in poetry. As a freshman at Harvard, he indicated he wanted Pound to be his mentor.
All this is about Kay Redfield Jamison's "groundbreaking" book, ROBERT LOWELL< SETTING THE RIVER ON FIRE: A STUDY OF GENIUS, MANIA and CHARACTER.
Chiasson concludes that the "defining feature of his gift was also the source of his suffering", which is something which I have always felt about the condition of being a poetry and writing poetry, which is all about feeling and the sensibility. Jonathan Raban called Lowell the most "contiously metaphoric person"he had met.
Married to Elizabeth Hardwick, Lowell had a child with her and was hospitalized 12 x in the period of 1949-1964, during the publication of his two most important books: "Life Studies" and "for the Union Dead". I heard Lowell read on a July 4? celebration in NYC before he died from this collection.
Read the review...
.
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