We all know the story of the poets—the stereotype, the trope. Lord Byron is the model, or Rimbaud, maybe, or even that vagabond thief François Villon, pardoned by the French king only because his poetry was so good. The poets were the rock stars of their time, and they led lives of wildness and excess, filled with the passion, drama, and excitement that suffused their poetry.
Sadly, the story is untrue—or so rarely true that it might as well be false. If poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility, as Wordsworth claimed, then the poets’ lives must contain at least enough tranquility that they can get their actual work done. It’s not enough to feel. A poet needs a time apart from feeling, too, and lots of it: a life with more serenity than turmoil.
The stereotypical account of the poets’ lives comes, in part, from the trap into which biographers almost inevitably fall—for descriptions of hours spent at a desk, scribbling verses and editing rhymes, just aren’t terribly interesting to read. Better to describe the argument a poet had with his mistress, the shouting match with a rival in a bar, the slanging that preceded a divorce.
The American poet Robert Lowell, for example, had by all accounts a tumultuous and turbulent life, and in a new biographical sketch, Robert Lowell in Love, Jeffrey Meyers recounts his attempts to document each of the wild affairs and relationships Lowell formed with the women who served him as serial muses. Unfortunately, it’s only the emotion that we discern in Meyers’s account, not the tranquility. And good though the detective work proves to be, the book’s reading of Lowell’s poetry suffers as a result. The origins of verse are never quite the conclusions. Lowell once began a poem called something like "To My Wife Jean on Her Confirmation," which evolved (or devolved, depending on one’s point of view) into an effort to write "To a Whore in the Brooklyn Navy Yard."
Jeffrey Meyers is an indefatigable researcher and biographer—the author of over fifty books, pouring out volumes on everyone from Wyndham Lewis, D.H. Lawrence, and Ernest Hemingway to Errol Flynn, John Huston, and Gary Cooper. "I may be the only writer sufficiently versatile," he once boasted, "to write a biography of Marilyn Monroe and immediately follow it with a life of Samuel Johnson." And that may well be true. If he isn’t the only writer sufficiently versatile, he’s certainly the only writer sufficiently indefatigable. It’s a puzzle how he can do the sheer amount of typing necessary for his work and still have any time for the tightly focused, deeply dug researching that seems his primary skill.
Something about Robert Lowell scratches at Meyers, like the itch of an old scar. Despite two previous books that touch on the American poet, Meyers found himself compelled to return yet again to Lowell’s life. And why not? After the death of Robert Frost in 1963, Time magazine put Lowell on its cover—for he was widely perceived to be our next great national poet. Our last great national poet, as it happens, not because we haven’t had good poets since Lowell’s death in 1977 but because, somewhere along the way, poetry ceased to be a matter of national concern.
Besides, Lowell was interesting. The scion of a Brahmin family in Boston (Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots, / And the Cabots talk only to God), he counted among his relatives wild eccentrics and polished presidents of Harvard in almost equal numbers. From his stint in prison (for refusal to serve in the Second World War) to his death, he suffered over a dozen episodes of insanity and was confined in fifteen psychiatric facilities. And along the way, he won every poetry prize the United States had to offer: perfecting the verse of the Catholic renaissance with his first full book, Lord Weary’s Castle, in 1946; helping invent the school of Confessional Poetry with Life Studies in 1959; and drawing together American history and his personal life in poems from "For the Union Dead" to "Waking Early Sunday Morning."
In Robert Lowell in Love, Jeffrey Meyers wants all this to be due to the women in the poet’s life, beginning with Lowell’s three wives. The first, Jean Stafford, was another writer in the Catholic renaissance—a success with her 1944 novel Boston Adventure—and a women whose work is unfairly forgotten these days (and unfairly depreciated by Meyers). Lowell would break her nose once in a drunken car accident, break it again with his fist, and subject her to bout after bout of near madness.
Lowell’s second wife was another writer, Elizabeth Hardwick, whom he would treat even worse. His psychotic episodes, his drinking, and his parade of affairs were bad enough. After twenty years of marriage, he would desert her for a British figure named Lady Caroline Blackwood—then include lines from Hardwick’s private letters to him in a book of poetry (a book for which he won the Pulitzer prize, just to complete her embarrassment). Lowell would die of a heart attack, age 60, in a taxi on his way back to Hardwick, while carrying the portrait of Blackwood that Lucien Freud had painted.
Meyers promotes as the center of his book an account of the nine of Lowell’s lovers that he was able to interview. (He even devotes an appendix to recounting all he had to do to find them.) Like Hardwick, they are, for the most part, astonishingly generous and forgiving, but to learn of Lowell’s behavior is to agree with the sentiment he expressed in a letter: "Sometimes I think I am the enemy of womankind."
Lowell was a handsome and famous man, capable of enormous charm, and his lovers report that his commitment to his art was devastatingly attractive. He was not exactly a wolf, on the hunt for sexual prey, but he was a man who needed women—their companionship and conversation. From the time he divorced Stafford in 1948, he was constantly in the care of one woman or another, and he usually had plans for another woman, too, just in case his needs were going unfulfilled. But apart from the titillation, what are these stories worth? Why should we bother with Robert Lowell in Love?
The poet lived a messy, mad, and ill-mannered life, injuring those around him with a profligacy made even clearer by the new facts Jeffrey Meyers has uncovered. But the man’s behavior seems insufficient in its power to motivate either the writing or the reading of his poetry. Lowell deserves to be read despite his sins, not because of them. The drama he either ginned up or indulged in his affairs was not poetry, or even the sole cause of poetry, however much Meyers wants to see each of these women as a muse for the man.
Emotion, yes. But Wordsworth knew the necessary sequel of tranquility. Enough tranquility to work.