Fleurs du Mal Magazine
Or see the index
In this magisterial study of the relationship between illness and art, the best-selling author of An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison, brings an entirely fresh understanding to the work and life of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), whose intense, complex, and personal verse left a lasting mark on the English language and changed the public discourse about private matters.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry, Robert Lowell put his manic-depressive illness (now known as bipolar disorder) into the public domain, creating a language for madness that was new and arresting. As Dr. Jamison brings her expertise in mood disorders to bear on Lowell’s story, she illuminates not only the relationships among mania, depression, and creativity but also the details of Lowell’s treatment and how illness and treatment influenced the great work that he produced (and often became its subject).
Lowell’s New England roots, early breakdowns, marriages to three eminent writers, friendships with other poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, his many hospitalizations, his vivid presence as both a teacher and a maker of poems—Jamison gives us the poet’s life through a lens that focuses our understanding of his intense discipline, courage, and commitment to his art. Jamison had unprecedented access to Lowell’s medical records, as well as to previously unpublished drafts and fragments of poems, and she is the first biographer to have spoken with his daughter, Harriet Lowell. With this new material and a psychologist’s deep insight, Jamison delivers a bold, sympathetic account of a poet who was—both despite and because of mental illness—a passionate, original observer of the human condition.
Kay Redfield Jamison is the Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders and a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, as well as an honorary professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is the author of the national best sellers An Unquiet Mind, Night Falls Fast, and Touched with Fire, and is the coauthor of the standard medical text on bipolar disorder, Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression. Dr. Jamison is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Edinburgh and is a recipient of the Lewis Thomas Prize, the Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health from the National Academy of Medicine, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. She is married to Thomas Traill, a cardiologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire
A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character
By Kay Redfield Jamison
Literary Figure Biographies & Memoirs
Paperback
Feb 06, 2018
560 Pages
$18.95
Published by Vintage
ISBN 9780307744616
new books
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: - Book News, Archive I-J, Archive K-L, Archive K-L, BIOGRAPHY, DRUGS & MEDICINE & LITERATURE, Robert Lowell
Gathered on the occasion of Robert Lowell’s one hundredth birthday, New Selected Poems offers a fresh and illuminating representation of one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry.
The renowned and controversial author of many books of poems, plays, and translations, Lowell was one of the United States’ most honoured poets, winning the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1947 and 1974, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
His ongoing interrogation of his family legacy, his personal struggle with manic depression, and his mastery of the tradition of poetry in English formed the groundbreaking autobiographical foundation of Life Studies (1959) and the books that followed it, including For the Union Dead (1964), Near the Ocean (1967), History (1973), and Day by Day (1977).
Katie Peterson’s incisive selection of Lowell’s poems draws attention to ‘the perishability of life, its twinned quality of fragility and repetition, as framed by the structured evanescence of daily consciousness.’ Lowell’s own intense dramas and struggles are the substrate he drew on in his restless search to make sense of, and fix, shape-shifting experience – not his, but ours. As Peterson says, Lowell was ‘constitutionally immune to any stultifying permanence either of form or of spirit.’ Her brilliant new reading of Lowell shows us his work constantly breaking, renewing, transforming, as he strives restlessly, over and over, to find an elusive unity.
Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was born in Boston. He was recognised as an accomplished poet in his own lifetime, and along with Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman and Sylvia Plath he created the fashion and generated the force of American poetry over the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Life Studies, published in 1959, marked a watershed. It initiated an autobiographical project which would dominate his oeuvre thereafter, and is now regarded as one of the most influential books of the century. He received a Pulitzer Prize for Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and another for The Dolphin (1973).
New Selected Poems
by Robert Lowell (Author),
Katie Peterson (Editor)
ISBN 9780571339488
Format Paperback
Published 03/08/2017
Length 272 pages
£14.99
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374251339
ISBN-13: 978-0374251338
new poetry books
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: - Book News, Archive K-L, Archive K-L, Art & Literature News, Robert Lowell
Thank you for reading Fleurs du Mal - magazine for art & literature