Mad, good and dangerous to know

‘Tomorrow morning some poet may, like Byron, wake up to find himself famous,’ wrote Randall Jarrell, ‘for having written a novel, for having killed his wife; it will not be for having written a poem.’ Jarrell’s cynicism is too slick, too rueful; but it does snag something in Robert Lowell, as it does in several of the American poets of his generation. Lowell was, at his best, a towering poet, but his public fame often rested on other things: that he was Boston posh; that he publicly thumbed his nose at the government; that he was, above all, mad.

He was all these things, and a great poet, too. It’s easy myth-making to say that Lowell’s genius and his madness went hand in hand, but it’s certainly the case that they took turns at the helm. At one point, he writes to Pound that the writer’s colony Yaddo is ‘a sort of St Elizabeth’s without bars’ (history doesn’t record whether Idaho Ez found that funny); later, Lowell reports of his own psychiatric hospital that it is ‘not unlike Yaddo without race courses, night life and literati’.