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Robert Lowell
1917–1977
Question: why do I write? Answer: if I stop,
I might as well stop breathing.
Robert T. S. Lowell III was born in Boston, Massachusetts on 1st March 1917 into a gently declining branch of one of New England’s most august families. At seventeen, he made a sudden decision to become a poet; he studied and was friends with John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and the great critic Randall Jarrell; his first-ish volume, Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), announced him as a major poet; his third, Life Studies (1957) established him as the pre-eminent poet, and poetic influence, of his period. A man of great personal magnetism, will and energy, he taught pretty much continuously, wrote prodigiously and was married three times, often very unhappily, to three writers – the short-story writer Jean Stafford, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick and the novelist Caroline Blackwood – these relationships and others were greatly tested by the fearsome manic depression for which he was frequently hospitalised. On the 12th September 1977, riding in a taxi from JFK to Manhattan in the hope of reuniting with Elizabeth Hardwick, and holding Lucien Freud’s painting of Caroline Blackwood, whom he had just told he was leaving, Lowell suffered a heart attack and died.
Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing. I suppose that’s what vocation means – at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction, so I’m thankful, and call it good …
Curiosities
In February 1949, Lowell suffered his first major bipolar episode, for which he was hospitalised – the first of 20 hospitalisations for his mania – and treated with electro-convulsive therapy.
Robert Lowell couldn’t write: he could only print out words. The only two words he could actually write were, fittingly, Robert Lowell.
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