Our end drifts nearer,
The moon lifts,
Radiant with terror.
The state
Is a diver under a glass bell.
—Robert Lowell, from “Fall 1961”

Should we care what a great poet thinks of the state or its wars? Virgil’s patriotic Aeneid complemented the imperial ambitions of Augustus. More recent verse has treated nationalism with irony, sometimes situational as well as intentional: during World War I, Wilfred Owen penned the antiwar gem “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” only to die in battle a week before the Armistice.

Robert Lowell (1917-77) had a particularly modern reaction to war and the politics that propelled it: resistance and rejection. Dismayed at the many civilian casualties of Allied bombing campaigns, he refused to serve and was jailed as a conscientious objector during World War II. In the late ’60s, Lowell frequently appeared at antiwar rallies, deplored nuclear weapons, and yet paradoxically declared himself an “anarchical conservative.”

Who was this contradictory character, who wrote some of the best poetry of the last century? These letters are an unselfconscious autobiography—a candid glimpse of what Lowell really felt about his friends, literature, and world affairs. Paleoconservatives will appreciate some of Lowell’s nuanced political positions, and admirers of his writing will find at least as much of the real Lowell in his letters as was revealed in Ian Hamilton’s excellent 1982 biography.

One is immediately struck by how Lowell is unable to commit himself to one woman or place, having had three marriages, many liaisons, and almost 40 addresses. He also suffered from both manic and ordinary depression. After undergoing his first major attack in his 30s, Lowell began the work for which he’s best known—confessional verse, which sometimes describes his manic episodes.

Though his confessional poems may seem ingenuous, they were in fact laboriously crafted; these letters, by contrast, contain Lowell’s most open, impulsive writing. Often they show him striving to cope with his many dualities: “My trouble seems … to be to bring together in me the Puritanical iron hand of constraint and the gushes of pure wildness.” Whether he successfully reconciled his “companionable, social self,” as Saskia Hamilton puts it, with his admittedly “ragged conduct…[and] squabbling uncontrollable desires” is open to question.

Lowell’s literary vignettes are high points of this book. Adept at capturing someone’s essence in a sentence or two, he offers vivid anecdotes about many eminences, including Eliot, Pound, Santayana, Tate, Ransom, and Frost. There are snapshots of Eliot unable to work an elevator; Pound offering “a torrent of oracular advice on how to run Spain”; Dylan Thomas “dumpy, absurd body, hair combed by a salad spoon, brown-button Welsh eyes always moving suspiciously…”; Philip Larkin “low-spoken, bald, deaf, deathbrooding, a sculptured statue of his poems”; Yale professor Cleanth Brooks buying “a 1710 salt box house which he has restored so that it is far more like itself and in period than when it was built.”

One sketch of 48-year-old John Berryman, an eventual suicide, stands out:

utterly spooky, teaching brilliant classes, spending weekends in the sanitarium, seedy a little bald, often drunk, married to a girl of twenty-one from a Catholic parochial college, white, innocent beyond belief, just pregnant. They live in two rooms—in one Kate is asleep, getting through the first child pains, in the other, a thousand books, and John is going into his 7th year on a long poem that fills a suitcase…

Lowell doesn’t pull punches even with his closest associates. Randall Jarrell is “a terror for his friends in public—you are either corrected, ignored or expected to loudly agree.” Lowell ultimately finds evidence in Jarrell’s suicide of how lowbrow America can prove fatal to delicate literati: “Oh but he was an absolutely gifted, and noble man, poisoned and killed … by our tasteless, superficial, brutal culture.”

Lowell also offers valuable insights on the poetic process, writing to Santayana in 1950, “I take a long time to get wound up and only strike fire when faced by the verbal, rhetorical and compositional densities of the verses in front of me; only at that point do I find significance among the narrows and obstacles… . One likes to have the hammer in one’s hands.”

He goes on to show himself at work: “I’ve been furiously writing at poems and spent whole blue and golden Maine days in my bedroom with a ghastly utility bedside lamp on, my pajamas turning oily with sweat…” Lowell’s talent for simile is always evident, as he complains, “Prose is hell. I want to change every two words, but while I toy with revisions, the subject stinks like a dead whale and lies in the mud of the mind’s bottom.”

Though one may assume that Lowell’s mental instability inspired the apparent looseness of his confessional mode, he was never a spontaneous poet. An obsessive reviser, he achieved naturalistic effects only with great effort. “I’ve been writing poems like a house on fire, i.e., for me that means five in six weeks, fifty versions of each,” he writes to William Carlos Williams in 1957. “I’ve been experimenting with mixing loose and free meters with strict in order to get the accuracy, naturalness, and multiplicity of prose … .”

Hamilton includes many letters written when Lowell was manic, and their ejaculatory tone balances out the sometimes icy self-assurance of his other missives. Of Lowell’s two sides—the manic and the buttoned-up—the former is the more engaging and appealing. As Lowell’s mania subsides, he seems to grasp at happiness and stability so fervently because they slip away from him so easily. Indeed, he often writes about his manic self as an unruly third party in need of constant care from the women in his life.

Lowell’s descriptions of depression are chilling. “I was a prophet and everything was a symbol,” he writes to his mistress Gertrude Buckman in 1949, “then in the hospital: shouting, tearing things up—religion and antics. Then depression (extreme) aching, self-enclosed, fearful of everyone and everything anyone could do, feeling I was nothing and could do nothing.” Recovery evokes arresting comparisons: “Psycho-therapy is rather amazing—something like stirring up the bottom of aquarium—chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct.”

Despite his instabilities, Lowell usually viewed politics with firm convictions. Though initially eager to enlist during World War II, he writes President Roosevelt to justify his refusal to fight because of Allied policy. He finds parallels between Axis Germany and the Civil War South, arguing “Americans cannot plead ignorance of the lasting consequences of a war carried through to unconditional surrender—our Southern states … after their terrible battering down and occupation, are still far from having recovered even their material prosperity.” He served five months in prison for rejecting the draft.

Lowell’s political integrity is also evident as things heat up in the late 1960s. “Mostly, I am afraid of spreading myself thin, of finding myself sounding off on all sorts of things I am not an authority on,” he writes when turning down radical Jesuit Daniel Berrigan’s request for a preface. And unlike other intellectuals in the ’60s, Lowell remained unseduced by the USSR, a “totalitarian tyranny committed to world revolution and total global domination through propaganda and violence.” Similarly, Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution “brings home … frighteningly how certain red-capped liberal feelings can go with a sinister acceptance of the terrible.”

When Lowell goes on anti-Vietnam demonstrations and supports Eugene McCarthy, he appears to be doing so out of grudging allegiance to his left-wing New York/Boston literary milieu. He is never a zealot: “I suppose I am Leftist in a rather removed way, or is it that I am Conservative in a rather middleclass and dissolute way. The labels don’t work. I have no faith in idealist violence or in revolution.”

In fact, Lowell often sounds reactionary, claiming in 1968, “I have never been New Left, Old Left, or liberal. I wish to turn the clock back with every breath I take…” As a poet, his first concern is verbal integrity: “I’ve hardly met the real Lesbian storm troops, but I think they talk like hysterical Negroes and other fanatics—the meaning of words, the object they denote[,] mean nothing.” He also sees through popular Beat poets Ginsberg and Corso, who are “phony in a way because they have made a lot of publicity out of very little talent … they are pathetic and doomed.”

Retrograde aristocrat and reluctant do-gooder co-existed uneasily in Lowell. He writes to Elizabeth Bishop in late 1969, “I get less leftist, if that were possible, every day, but am going to the march again … .” Unlike typically earnest liberals, however, Lowell usually had a sense of humor about politics, remarking cavalierly to his second wife, “The one advantage I find in Woman’s Lib is that I can start off humorous or angry arguments with any woman.”

Indeed, Lowell’s duality emerges strongly in his tempestuous relations with women; his treatment of wives and mistresses ranged from manic devotion to self-justifying caddishness. He refers to some of his extramarital affairs as “manic crushes,” and it’s frankly refreshing to see him blow his patrician cool when he falls for Giovanna Madonia, to whom he exults, “I live only in you, your heart beats in mine…every bone in my body, every drop of blood, every nerve and sinew in my mind, are yours!”

Lowell eventually returns to his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, ushering off Madonia with: “You are everything! But I see more and more clearly that I will never be over my disturbance and back to my health and work again without Elizabeth.” Leaving Madonia to figure out how she could be “everything” to him yet no longer see him, Lowell calms down, re-embracing both Hardwick and epistolary restraint.

He later begins another affair with Anglo-Irish femme fatale Caroline Blackwood, and his behavior turns increasingly erratic. With little explanation, Lowell abandons Hardwick and their teenage daughter to live on Blackwood’s estate in Kent. After having a son with Blackwood, Lowell becomes ambivalent about their relationship, asking her, “Aren’t we too heady and dangerous for each other?” Lowell’s letters to Blackwood grow pitiable; he dies of a heart attack at 60 in the back of a cab on his way to visit Hardwick in New York.

Hamilton includes a superb introduction to Lowell’s tumultuous life and makes unobtrusive corrections to his grammar and punctuation. She has also compiled extensive notes that contain illuminating information about the persons, events, and controversies Lowell refers to in his letters.

This book will interest many readers. Lowell devotees will find details of his life and tastes unavailable elsewhere. Students of 20th-century literature will value Lowell’s observations about his contemporaries. Poets can trace Lowell’s artistic development and see how he wrestled with his craft.

Ideologues of the Left or Right won’t find much to like here, however. Though Lowell cared about politics, he cared infinitely more about his art. Warfare and other worldly events were his muses, not his masters.
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Thomas Dineen writes from Baltimore, Md.