Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison (review)

Kay Redfield Jamison's magisterial Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire reveals two stories: the one she tells, about the most famous American postwar poet, who struggled with severe manic-depressive illness throughout his adult life, and the other she does not tell, about her own battle with the same mood disorder. The two stories, stitched seamlessly together, are both fascinating.

Robert Lowell (1917–1977) was the early major figure behind the Confessional poetry movement, later joined by two of his Boston University students, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Lowell's Life Studies, one of the transformative poetry volumes of the twentieth century, won the 1960 National Book Award. Two other poetry volumes, Lord Weary's Castle and The Dolphin, earned Pulitzer Prizes in 1947 and 1974, respectively. Lowell served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, an appointment now called the U.S. Poet Laureate, from 1947–1948. He was one of the few poets to appear on the cover of Time magazine, in June 1967, where he was hailed as the "best American poet of his generation."

Lowell was born into an illustrious Boston family that included on his paternal side the poets James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) and Amy Lowell (1874–1925), also a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and on his maternal side the Calvinist fire-and-brimstone theologian Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan preacher and poet Anne Hutchinson. Serious mental instability affected both sides of Lowell's family. He suffered sixteen psychotic breaks, beginning in his early thirties, resulting in prolonged hospitalizations, many of which occurred at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, where, according to Jamison's research, his great-great-grandmother (James Russell Lowell's mother) had also been institutionalized a century earlier. Madness was the overwhelming fear in Lowell's life, but rather than concealing his psychiatric breakdowns, he frequently wrote about them, both to destigmatize mental illness and to show how his creativity was allied to his mercurial moods. Madness became, as Jamison demonstrates, a driving force behind his poetry.

No one is better qualified to write about manic-depressive illness than Jamison. She is the Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders and a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she has taught since the mid-1980s. She is the coauthor, with the psychiatrist Frederick K. Goodwin, of Manic-Depressive Illness, first published in 1990 and republished in a second edition in 2007 with the subtitle: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression. Over twelve hundred pages long, the tome is still regarded as the standard medical text on the subject. Jamison's second book, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1993), remains the single best study of the relationship between mood disorders and creativity. Not until her third book, however, the searing memoir An Unquiet Mind (1995), did Jamison write about her own history of manic depression and close encounter with suicide. Her spousal loss memoir, Nothing Was the Same (2009), is a heartfelt tribute to the memory of her husband, Dr. Richard Wyatt, a noted schizophrenia researcher who died of cancer in 2002 at age sixty-three. A recipient in 2001 of a MacArthur Fellowship, Jamison has earned several major awards, including being chosen by Time magazine as a "Hero of Medicine."

In Robert Lowell, Jamison's luminous prose and the metaphorical power of her language reveal her own poetic side. Her book on Lowell is about "fire in the blood and darkness; it is about mania and the precarious, deranging altitude to which mania ascends. It is about the poetic imagination and how mania and imagination come together to create great art. But it is as much and more about the vital role of discipline and character in making art from inborn gift" (p. 4). She could have been describing herself. Jamison focuses on a single poet, but her book is, in a larger sense, a study of poetry's...