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Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character QUOTES

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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