“They Tell Me Nothing’s Gone”: On Robert Lowell, Life Studies, and Recovery

By the time Robert Lowell started writing most of the poems in Life Studies, he had been hospitalized five times, mostly for acute mania, and all since the completion of The Mills of the Kavanaughs, his prior book. In both style and spirit, The Mills of the Kavanaughs was consistent with the poems Lowell had previously published: crowded with significance; their sentences careening over lines while dense words tumble and collide; the regular rhymes, strung through all that activity, sounding as erratic as cannon fire; the whole thing “congested and hurtling,” in Helen Vendler’s words. Those early poems, widely celebrated, were emblems of unmistakable talent, a modern Milton riding high on his genius, as in this stanza from “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”:

When the whale’s viscera go and the roll 
Of its corruption overruns this world  
Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Woods Hole
And Martha’s Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword   
Whistle and fall and sink into the fat?
In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat
The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,   
The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,   
The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears   
The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,
And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags   
And rips the sperm-whale’s midriff into rags,   
Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,   
Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers   
Where the morning stars sing out together
And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers   
The red flag hammered in the mast-head. Hide   
Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side.

It’s oddly ecstatic, all that heavy sound and violence and despair crashing around like the sea in a storm, everything seemingly out of control and yet yoked, all of it pulling Lowell forward—Lowell pulling forward, muscular and wild, and astonishingly, overwhelmingly at times, alive.

That style, slightly diminished, was still apparent in “Beyond the Alps,” one of the earliest poems Lowell wrote for Life Studies and the one he placed first in that book, as if announcing (but, as he writes in the poem, and as the poem’s style suggests, “Much against my will”) the return to earth that would mark its latter sections. In the penultimate stanza, even as the train Lowell rides in reaches sea level, he goes on ringing almost every available bell. The stanza opens with a relatively literal and direct statement, a single sentence that sits comfortably in its one line, but that sentence ends up serving mostly as a contrast for the subsequent acceleration:

Our mountain-climbing train had come to earth.
Tired of the querulous hush-hush of the wheels,
the blear-eyed ego kicking in my berth
lay still, and saw Apollo plant his heels
on terra firma through the morning’s thigh…
each backward, wasted Alp, a Parthenon,
five-branded socket of the Cyclops’ eye.
There were no tickets for that altitude
once held by Hellas, when the Goddess stood,
prince, pope, philosopher and golden bough,
pure mind and murder at the scything prow—
Minerva, the miscarriage of the brain. 

Though the heavy enjambments are gone, the similarities to “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” predominate. Even diminishment and decline manage to pick up heavy cargo here, still gathering mythological associations as they move away, still clanging as the long sentences tumble over his rhymes and the individual words bounce off each other like rocks: “prince, pope, philosopher and golden bough, / pure mind and murder at the scything prow.”

It wouldn’t be a stretch to call this style of writing manic, but that’s only a metaphor: to treat these poems as symptoms would be to misread both the poems and the illness. Nonetheless, after multiple encounters with actual mania, there’s no way Lowell, who often found inspiration for new work in the build up to delusion, and who so often saw his own life so lucidly (and who, for that matter, often seemed to experience metaphor as reality), could have missed the similarity.

Given the violent, crowded metaphor in the final line, it’s in fact likely that Lowell is already working with that connection in “Beyond the Alps.” In the last, almost unnecessary line above (coming on the heels of a couplet that could have closed the stanza, it doesn’t rhyme with anything before or after), with the poem almost done, Lowell, still looking back, adds a final mention of a god, now tying all this not only to history but to “the miscarriage of the brain.” The most immediate meaning of that phrase is a description of Minerva’s birth from Jupiter’s forehead, but Lowell’s version makes it more surprising, more grim, and more violent, and in doing so he renews its depiction of a mind’s powerless relation to its own creative power. Once again, Lowell’s dark brilliance pushes the poem toward a possible breaking point, loading meaning even into its awareness of the mind’s potential for rupture.

By the time he wrote “Beyond the Alps,” that potential was unmistakable in Lowell, as was the damage he did in flight. At times, Lowell would write about it with a terrible passivity, as in the final line of the much later poem “Dolphin”: “my eyes have seen what my hand did.” Always, except when manic, he felt mania’s readiness to return and make him monstrous again. According to Caroline Blackwood, Lowell told her late in his life, “It’s the most awful feeling—I never know when I’m going to hurt the people I love most. And I simply can’t stand it, and in a way I would rather be dead.” But Lowell always returned to life and writing, in spite of the extraordinary difficulty, and often heavily revised poems begun in a manic state. In fact, nearly as distressing as the shame and guilt of having hurt others badly was the fear of not being able to write anymore—to have life but not the ability to make anything of it. As Kay Redfield Jamison explains in Setting the River on Fire, “Dread of future attacks would weigh upon him. Mania not only blasted apart Lowell’s dealing with God, it shredded his belief in what he might expect of his mind.” On top of that, the first promising medication he found, Thorazine, left him feeling, in his words, “restless and weighed down.”

Complicating all this was the widespread suspicion that writing poetry was a trigger for Lowell’s manic breaks. As Jamison notes, “Lowell’s mother, Lowell, and Elizabeth Hardwick all believed writing poetry could excite Lowell into mania.” Partly as a therapeutic exercise, and partly as a way of writing without endangering his mind, Lowell began working on autobiographical prose, including what turned into “91 Revere Street,” the long prose memoir that stands, in Life Studies, between the more crowded poems in the book’s first section and the brittle, sometimes-nervous calm of the rest.

That doesn’t mean that Lowell’s new style was an attempt to ward off mania. Lowell wrote the first draft of “Waking in the Blue” while he was hospitalized and still at least somewhat manic. (It was originally addressed to a woman with whom he had begun one of his manic affairs.) That draft, in spite of its involvement with actual mania, is already audibly different from his earlier poems, even if it doesn’t yet have the brittleness of the final version. It begins:

Like the heart-toughening harpoon,
or steel plates of a press
needling, draining my heart—
your absence….
What use is my sense of humor,
basking over “jimmy”, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American (if such were possible from Harvard)
still with the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he lolls, ram-rod,
with the luxuriance of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely sulphurous from the Victorian plumbing. 

Lowell himself described the change not as a response to his illness, but as the sloughing off of a suffocating and distorting weight, locating the transitional moment in a series of West Coast readings during which his poems started to sound wrong to him:

Their style seemed distant, symbol-ridden and willfully difficult. I began to paraphrase my Latin quotations, and to add extra syllables to a line to make it clearer and more colloquial. I felt my old poems hid what they were really about, and many times offered a stiff, humorless and even impenetrable surface. […M]y own poems seemed like prehistoric monsters dragged down into the bog and death by their ponderous armor. I was reciting what I no longer felt… When I returned to my home, I began writing lines in a new style.

But Lowell was an exceptional reader of his own life and work, and it seems highly likely, when you begin tracing what the new poems ended up saying—what Lowell now, apparently, felt—that the “new style” in the final sections of Life Studies is also a complex representation of what it meant for Lowell not so much to be manic, which he rarely focuses on in those poems, as to attempt to recover, with all that word entails.

In “Home After Three Months Away,” a poem about one of Lowell’s returns after an extended hospitalization, he writes:

Dimpled with exaltation,
my daughter holds her levee in the tub.
Our noses rub,
each of us pats a stringy lock of hair—
they tell me nothing’s gone.
Though I am forty-one,
not forty now, the time I put away
was child’s play. After thirteen weeks
my child still dabs her cheeks
to start me shaving. When
we dress her in her sky-blue corduroy,
she changes to a boy,
and floats my shaving brush
and washcloth in the flush….
Dearest, I cannot loiter here
in lather like a polar bear. 

“They tell me nothing’s gone,” he writes, and uncertainty drifts in on the assertion. The whole thing sounds careful, the short lines generally broken after each phrase, the sentences themselves orderly and relatively direct. The whole book deals with decline—even the nostalgic treatment of his grandparents sees them in a world of privileges already breaking apart. But here, as in all of the poems in Life Studies’ last three sections, the brittleness is leavened and in some senses protected by a playful humor that is partly childlike and gently ironic. And that irony seems to wink, not in dismissal, but in the way that sunlight winks on water that moves without great force.

That disposition makes room for Lowell’s imagination to walk, however carefully, on earth. As Dan Chiasson has written, tracing the movement through prose and into this new way of making poems:

In recovery, at the suggestion of his psychiatrist, Lowell began to write prose autobiography, in a style, discovered in Flaubert, marked by “images and ironic or amusing particulars.” Particulars were not symbols; Lowell had found a way to write that did not require him to shunt every detail into cosmic significance. He had found a tone that implied pity, acceptance, and nostalgia, mild emotions that could be sustained across the arc of a narrative.

The shift is audible, too, in the way Lowell now uses rhyme. Instead of setting up a regular rhyme scheme, he seems to drift through the poem and occasionally pick up a rhyme in the same way he picks up the particulars—almost like a giant marveling at things he finds scattered throughout a smaller world. As with his daughter’s actions and his mirroring interactions with her, he seems to be moving according to those small, temporary surprises. And though in some way he seems stooped in his childish behavior, bending down to her level in both the scene and, from a greater distance, his tone, he also seems to be grateful for the opportunity. When he apologizes to her at the end of the stanza, he seems also to regret being called away from this shared world, ending with a simile that reenters their world of make-believe (as well as acknowledging its unreality: Lowell increasingly used similes to make connections while keeping them in the realm of play).

It is, among other things, a touching and persuasive rendering of parental affection, but Lowell, who so often abandoned his family when manic, also struggles with the limitations of his recovery. The poem ends “I keep no rank nor station. / Cured, I am frizzled, stall and small.” That final couplet follows a stanza of regular rhymes, and, unrhymed, it too feels diminished. If this is a cure, it is not, in at least one sense of the word, a true recovery. Much is gone, including his potential—if this is in fact a cure—for “exaltation,” a word that he uses in a context that leaves it both diminished and dear, describing his daughter as “Dimpled with exaltation.”

It’s worth noting, too, that “They tell me nothing’s gone” picks up the poem’s first word. “Gone,” Lowell begins, opening in a moment when he no longer is:

Gone now the baby’s nurse,
a lioness who ruled the roost
and made the mother cry.

The poem doesn’t resolve to a single feeling about the “cure.” Just as his pleasure in playing with his daughter seems real, so too does his sense of guilt at having left his family unprotected for three months. It’s an odd sentence, referring to “the baby” and “the mother,” making them seem slightly archetypal and mixing metaphors in the second line. It feels unsure and remote, as if it’s only from afar that Lowell can hold onto the gendered terms in which he seeks to reestablish himself. As the stanza continues, the nurse, his replacement, turns out to have preserved something important:

She used to tie
gobbets of porkrind  in bowknots of gauze—
three months they hung like soggy toast
on our eight foot magnolia tree,
and helped the English sparrows
weather a Boston winter.

Given that the third stanza (the one immediately following “in lather like a polar bear” and immediately preceding the closing couplet) focuses on a more cultivated form of nature—a bed of imported Dutch tulips—that has fallen into disrepair, and given that those tulips take on associations with the family in the stanza’s last lines (“they cannot meet / another year’s snowballing enervation”), it seems certain that Lowell worked to write a symbolic structure into the poem. That system won’t yield any direct statements, though. Instead, it pulls on itself with palpable ambivalence.

It also serves as a reminder that autobiographical poems are not just the records and results of a life. But that doesn’t make them any less autobiographical. The poems are, the writing is, another part of the life—in Lowell’s case, a particularly large one. And if the poem ends in disarray and decline, it also, by virtue of its ability to make that status meaningful, registers a different present tense than the one conjugated in the poem’s verbs (“I am frizzled, stale and small”). That other present tense is the one in which Lowell began and eventually completed the writing and made something satisfactory of this scene. Neither erases or refutes the other. In fact, they depend on each other, and go on interacting, not all that different from the sequence of mirroring behaviors between Lowell and his daughter that Lowell, in the poem, describes—from his perspective as the poet—and, as the character, eventually leaves, perhaps to once again become the poet who could and would write about the scene.

If the earlier poems seemed almost manic, these poems often feel companionable. In moving more toward narrative, he also makes the storyteller into more of a presence. Gone, at least for now, is the earlier exceptionalism, implied and entangled—the sense that an alliance with truth can carry him to beyond the reach of anything human short of truth and awe. Significance, now, must live in a world of familiars and obligations. And health, in as much as this poem presents any image of it, resides in the ability, and the willingness, to hold himself accountable to smaller truths.

The poem is, in many ways, deeply sad. It places health on the side of uncomfortable restraint and illness on the side of moral failure, and life in every form feels unsustainable—except, maybe, for the nurse’s blunt, unsentimental rule. But no successful art is devoid of consolation. And much of the consolation here is that Lowell, even stooped, proves to be an extraordinary companion, even off balance. Without describing hope, he offers the pleasure of being together in a world where diminished things can sparkle with the awareness of someone else—the opportunity to tell. Lowell’s wit, thoroughly revised in these new poems, winks at the audience in invitation, making the small wintering rooms of the apartment large with an unlikely (and unsteady) warmth.

“Waking in the Blue,” stripped of its early romantic impulse, describes a series of characters isolated in illness. It ends in the disheartening acknowledgement that Lowell himself is another of its characters, joined in what he described, in “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” as an “air / of lost connections.” “We,” he writes, using that word for the first time in “Waking”’s last sentence, a listless run-on that simply falls across the final line break, submitting to gravity. “We are all old-timers, / each of us holds a locked razor.”

In both the first and the final drafts of the poem Lowell included the question “What use is my sense of humor?” Within the scene the poem describes, the question is rhetorical—there is no use because there is no one to answer, hear, or understand. But the poem itself becomes an answer. Written, like “Home After Three Months Away,” in the present tense, “Waking in the Blue” also seems to come from a separate present that is only partly removed from the moment it describes, one in which the crisis has not altogether abated but from which it, like Lowell’s humor (a sense of humor that was part of his earlier life but not the earlier poems), like his mind, might be put to some use—from which Lowell’s revised version of wit can stake its human claim.

That use seems perilous here, as it involves making fun of the characters Lowell will have to align himself with at the end—and seems to see himself potentially disappearing into throughout. The second stanza, which follows the parenthetical explanation “This is the house for the ‘mentally ill,’” reads in full:

What use is my sense of humor?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with the muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely ruinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson golf-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his figure,
of slimming on sherbet and ginger ale—
more cut off from words than a seal.

It’s no coincidence that Lowell, in a time when he was wondering how much of his old life, including his old excellence, could be recovered, devoted so much attention to a person isolated not only by illness but by his removal from language and his attempts to preserve his own early glory. (“The victorious figures of bravado ossified young” he writes a little later in the poem.) The humor in the stanza above, as humor so often does, connects by distancing. It pushes “Stanley” deeper into his estrangement, and in doing so it creates a vision of illness meant to entertain whoever might read the poem. But it also charges that decision with the awareness, never fully sublimated, that in reaching out for others Lowell is responding to his fear that his own life will be one of illness and isolation.  

The closest Lowell comes to a rhyme in the entire stanza is the repetition of the word “seal” (and, maybe, its faint echo of “ale”). In a move that he probably learned from Elizabeth Bishop (“Here and there / his brown skin hung in strips / like ancient wallpaper, / and its pattern of darker brown / was like wallpaper”), he builds from the first mention (“a ramrod / with the muscle of a seal”) only to land, at the end of a line, the end of a sentence, and the end of the stanza, on the same word, not so much enlarging the metaphor of a seal as suggesting that the speaker’s ability to figure the scene has run out. (And, in doing so, he suggests even the inadequacy of the first deployment. Stanley is “more cut off from words than a seal.”) Lowell’s sense of humor—his ability to make something of the scene—seems in that moment less put to use than simply used up. The light touch fizzles, trailing off.

But within this more hesitant style, the trailing off doesn’t feel terminal. It’s not just that the poem keeps going. It’s that these poems recover Lowell’s authority by allowing for incompletion—by allowing him to make connections without permanently yoking anything. He can grasp things and let them go. Wit is no longer an emblem of the world’s divine order, embodied in the genius of the poet. Rather, it’s a human response to disorder and disappointment. And it implies an audience beyond the old-timers, forever lost to each other, oblivious to his sense of humor and a danger to themselves. Helen Vendler has said that Lowell became “democratic in seeing other people as simply ruined creatures like himself.” In Life Studies, Lowell seems to be learning to live among others, as well as his own incomplete ruin.

To recover is not to return. Rather, it is to arrive at a place where one can live with the knowledge of what’s changed. Lowell describes his fellow patients as “ossified,” and the joints in these poems still creak a little, as if he were learning how to walk again after being suspended in traction for too long. Part of what makes this style—the poems written in this style, including those that return to Lowell’s childhood with an adult understanding, and try to stand again inside—so compelling is that they manage to suggest their own insufficiency without looking away. Still larger-than-life, Lowell doesn’t fit comfortably in these poems, but he shuffles through them with skill and pleasure and care, his feet tracing out imaginative paths in moving through spaces too small to allow for agility.

“Skunk Hour,” the last poem in Life Studies, was one of the first Lowell wrote. In some ways, it feels older than the other poems in the book’s “Life Study” section—more regular in meter, most of its stanzas ending with a perfect rhyme. But in closing the book, it also seems to point toward the future. Maybe it’s only because I know what’s next, but the poem seems restless to move beyond recovery—or, to recover his claim to something larger than his old life, to recover something of the old life’s wider gaze. The public ambition of poems like “For the Union Dead” (which Lowell added at the end of Life Studies when the paperback version came out) seems already to pull on the poet’s mind. It’s not a rebuke of poems like “Home After Three Months Away,” but “Skunk Hour” does suggest that something of the old energies still pulled on the poet’s imagination. One of the few poems in that section that depicts mania—as opposed to its aftermath—it suggests some of the ways Lowell would begin pulling on this new style, as well as the complicated ways in which he would borrow from the lessons (and appeals) of madness and recovery in continuing to revise his style.

An “air / of lost connections” drifts through “Skunk Hour,” too. Three times, all of them in the two stanzas that deepen and darken the poem from its opening in mostly gentle social satire, sentences end in ellipses. (In an earlier version, those drifting stanzas of despair were the poem’s first; Lowell only added the lighter opening later on.) Ellipses, in fact, float throughout Life Studies. The sonnet that precedes “Skunk Hour” has three of them. The longer “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Wilson,” which opens the “Life Studies” section, has thirteen. The grand unities are replaced by a repeated flagging. Even the phrase “his air / of lost connections” ends with four periods floating away from the poem’s moorings, with nothing more to come.

But those losses sometimes leave space for a second—or third, or twelfth—approach. Here, too, Lowell may have been learning from Bishop. (“Skunk Hour,” which he credited with his breakthrough into the new style, takes its form from Bishop’s “The Armadillo.”) These poems have room to rethink. They revise—downward, more often than not.

There’s one such revision when “Skunk Hour” is still in the mode of social comedy: “The season’s ill,” Lowell writes, smearing the landscape with pathos and what seems, at first, like projection. But after a dash, he descends into particulars: “we’ve lost our summer millionaire,” he writes, and under the restored satirical tone a possible suicide emerges to fill in the loss, an explanation that he can’t quite bear to name. Lowell turns away after a few more lines, once again displacing whatever happened onto the landscape, but the opening phrase—“The season’s ill”—lingers long enough for Lowell to pick up the echo after the poem’s first ellipses: “My mind’s not right.”

An echo, but also an inversion. It’s in the lead-up to that short statement, and its brief retreat from the present tense, that the poem comes unmoored:

One dark night, 
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town….

He pulls back, as if he’s raced far enough outside himself to hear himself, and, returning to the present, tells the less flattering, less exalted truth: “My mind’s not right.” At the end of the next stanza he’ll admit, “nobody’s here,” then another dash will carry him over into another, plainer, truth: no one but skunks. Those two admissions turn the poem’s interest in isolation two ways at once. Cutting him off from the imagined world of physical connection where he lurks grotesquely at the margin, hungry for contact or vision, they also potentially return him from the isolation of ecstatic delusion. And as the poem briefly crowds with the potential, complex company of literary allusions—the “dark night” recalling San Juan de la Cruz, both “My mind’s not right” and “I myself am hell” recalling Milton—Lowell seems to reject that exalting for the terms of contemporary society in which psychology and, increasingly, medicine, (the disciplines that, along with those who loved him, restored Lowell time and again) resist mystical interpretations of experience.

But that rejection doesn’t come easily. Until that last revision—the skunks arriving as themselves, unable to be displaced by or into metaphor (except in as much as their focus on creating and sustaining living things, offspring, serves in its very literalism as a rebuke to the town’s inhabitants)—all understanding is subject to being infected with madness. Even the recognition that all he perceives is a manifestation of madness can run away with him. The plain honesty of “My mind’s not right” accelerates just a few lines later: “I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, / as if my hand were at its throat….” And even the correction that follows those ellipses, though it echoes “My mind’s not right,” feels dangerous, laden with too much literary cargo, equating himself with Milton’s heroic Lucifer. He has to try again to get all the way down to the truth that “nobody’s here.” And even that will be contested by the arrival of the skunks—though whether or not a skunk should really count as “somebody” in this context seems debatable: The skunks will prove indifferent to him. (Why anyone would want to scare a skunk remains a mystery to me.)

There’s another variable here. The poem opens in stasis: “Nautilus Island’s hermit / heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; / her sheep still graze above the sea.” (emphasis added) If there is ambition, it is an ambition to regress: “Thirsting for / the hierarchic privacy / of Queen Victoria’s century.” In that stillness, rot and sterility rule—including in the poem’s indifferent cruelty regarding the “fairy / decorator” who represents, in Lowell’s figuration, another image of isolation that makes nothing, children most of all. From one angle, those lost connections recall that sense of isolation, a world in which, to borrow from Bishop again, everything is “only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’” From another, though, they seem to run in the opposite direction. In letting something fail, or end, or falter, they also allow for starting again. They make room for something different, or new.

Sometimes I think I love Lowell’s poetry as a whole more than I love any one of his poems (with the likely exception of “Epilogue,” which seems to distill so much of his written life). Though the long period of his “sonnet” writing feels too mechanical, though his potential for cruelty cannot be entirely disentangled from his writing, there is also something heroic there. More than most of us, and in the face of a terrible, chronic illness, Lowell kept revising his life.

At times, those revisions involved him discarding his obligations to others, especially to Elizabeth Hardwick. But more often, at least in his poems, it meant deepening his obligations to and understanding of the past, including the past of the republic that he saw so intimately. Nothing suggests that Lowell stopped caring about greatness after those first bouts of mania. (Greatness, I suspect, became even more important to him then—a way to answer for the shame he so often felt.) But to recover his chance at greatness, he had to reorient his relationship to that ideal.

There was something godlike about Lowell, though he frequently fell to earth. And like Hephaestus, when he fell, he fell a long way and landed hard. His adult life was consumed equally with those climbs and falls and the work of exploring the craters his battered body left.

Recovery and revision were, I suspect, inseparable for him, a way to stay meaningfully alive. Seeking the summit of Olympus again each time, he tried to tell the truth about what he’d seen, including what his hand had done, and including, too, the analogous but far larger brutality of the homeland—the small, representative corner of the republic—he rarely left for long. “For the Union Dead” seems to me to wait just outside the final margins of Life Studies. And Vendler’s claim bears repeating: Lowell became “democratic in seeing other people as simply ruined creatures like himself.” The original and enduring sins of America grew plainer, clearer, and—a term that repeats throughout that poem—closer, as he worked to shore his own fragments against their frequent ruin.