Madness In Lowell's Poetry

As Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Much madness is divinest sense, and much sense the starkest madness.” From Dionysian ritual to the notion of epilepsy as divine illness, altered states have been associated with inspiration. The idea that poetry and madness are deeply interwined, and that madness sometimes leads to the most divine poetry, has been with us since antiquity. The everlasting and growing interest of neurotic poets results from the tight relationship between mental illness and poetic creation. Traditionally, psycholpathology is regarded as the disease of the self, and poetry is kind of writing that is closest in to the self. More than other forms of writing, poetry is more often written in the first person. It is noteworthy that, most

Thomas Parkinson declares that “the person in history is the main subject” of Lowell’s For the Union Dead, whatmore, Parkinson highly appraise the treatment of “the moment where person and history meet” in Lowell’s poems. Also, Richard Poirier asserts in Critics on Robert Lowell that Lowell’s personal breakdown and his visions of public or historical decline are closely related, he further agrees that “the assurance that the poet’s most private experiences simply are of historical, even mythical, importance gives this poetry an extraordinary air of personal authority.”
The form and linguistic paradigm of Confessional poetry also attract alot of literary researchers. Of For the Union Dead, Lowell said in After Reading Six or Seven Essays on Me that "free verse subjects seemed to melt away, and I found myself back in strict meter, yet tried to avoid the symbols and heroics of my first books." In his next collection, Near the Ocean, he wrote a long sequence in eight-line four-foot couplet stanzas, a form he borrowed from the seventeenth-century English poet Andrew