Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire Quotes

“Madness is easy to overdramatize and thereby underestimate; it is less easy to convey its capacity to erode identity, disfigure love, and violate trust. The real horror of madness is more subtle and corrosive than its caricature.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character

“These qualities—independence, contrariness, ambition, toughness, receptiveness to experience—are the blood supply to a creative mind and temperament; they are wellspring to imagination. The ferocity and peculiarity that shadowed him when he was a boy later made their own contributions to the man and to his poetry. Lowell recognized that he could be remarkable. When he was eighteen he wrote in a school essay that “the accomplishments of man are unlimited…when he places all the strength of his mind and body to the task, a new almost divine power takes possession of him.” The enlightened mind is “always questioning itself, always seeking means of self-improvement, and always striving for something higher.” While still in school, his friend Frank Parker”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character

“the usual limits of understanding another’s mind are compounded when trying to understand Lowell, a man who thought in metaphor, lived in history, and whose mind was engaged in a restless, stupendously elaborate game of three-dimensional chess. Lowell’s mind was of a lurching, revising originality.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character

“Language, on the other hand, newer to the brain, may be more linked to those parts that regulate dopamine and thereby connected to pleasure.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character

“He was twenty years old when he left New England. By the age of thirty he had exchanged Protestantism for Catholicism, anonymity for literary acclaim, and sanity for madness.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character