[New-Poetry] Re: laureate

[jforjames at aol.com]

Lowell?was bi-polar...and had the manic?& depressive swings associated with that disease.
The manic swings can go into the psychotic range. May account for some of this.
There are many who account for high incidence of alcoholism?among bi-polars as?a form
of ''self-medication'. 

This would have?to be the nadir of American interventionism if the CIA sent Robert Lowell on a mission.
If only more of country's dark ops were so benign and ineffectual.

Finnegan


-----Original Message-----
From: Roger Day <rog3r.day at gmail.com>
Sent: Mon, 5 May 2008 4:37 pm
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: laureate



There's a wonderful story in Stonor Saunders book "Who pays the piper"
about Lowell (drunk of course) in an open-top car with driver
careering through the Buenos Aires night. Lowell is standing up giving
Nazi salutes and shouting nazi slogans.

Lowell, like all the rest of the puppets, was paid through the
Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA front organisation. I believe
they paid off a UK mag as well.

Roger

On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 9:22 PM, David Bircumshaw
<david.bircumshaw at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
>  Sometime in the 1960s the CIA also sent on him on a reading tour to Latin
> America to counter the influence of Neruda. I know that seems weird, but,
> there again, so's our Poet Laureate's official salary.
>
>  I am told, though, that Andrew Motion wears the most marvellous silk ties.
> This, admiringly, by a pair of Midlands literary editors.
>
>
>
>
> It seems that James is right, from Wikipedia the incredible ancestors of his
> mother, and his brief bio:
>
>
>
> Robert Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a Boston Brahmin family
> that included the poets Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell. His mother,
> Charlotte Winslow, was a direct descendant of William Samuel Johnson, a
> signer of the United States Constitution, Jonathan Edwards, the famed
> philosopher, Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan preacher and healer, Robert
> Livingston the Elder, Thomas Dudley, the second governor of Massachusetts,
> and Mayflower passengers James Chilton and his daughter Mary Chilton. He was
> at St. Mark's School, a prominent prep-school in Southborough, Mass, before
> attending Harvard College for two years and transferring to Kenyon College
> in Gambier, Ohio, to study under John Crowe Ransom.[1] He converted from
> Episcopalianism to Catholicism,[2] which influenced his first two books,
> Land of Unlikeness (1944) and the Pulitzer Prize winning Lord Weary's Castle
> (1946). In 1950, Lowell was included in the influential anthology
> Mid-Century American Poets as one of the key literary figures of his
> generation. Among his contemporaries who also appeared in that book were
> Muriel Rukeyser, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Randall
> Jarrell, and John Ciardi, all poets who came into prominence in the 1940s.
>
> Lowell was a conscientious objector during World War II and served several
> months at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. During the 1960s he
> was active in the civil rights movement and opposed the US involvement in
> Vietnam. His participation in the October 1967 peace march in Washington,
> DC, and his subsequent arrest are described in the early sections of Norman
> Mailer's The Armies of the Night.
>
> Lowell suffered with alcoholism and manic depression and was hospitalized
> many times throughout his life. He was married to novelist Jean Stafford
> from 1940 to 1948. In 1949 he married the writer Elizabeth Hardwick. In 1970
> he left Elizabeth Hardwick for the British author Lady Caroline Blackwood.
> He spent many of his last years in England. Lowell died in 1977, having
> suffered a heart attack in a cab in New York City on his way to see
> Elizabeth Hardwick. He is buried in Stark Cemetery, Dunbarton, New
> Hampshire.
>
> Lowell's collected poems were published in 2003 and his letters in 2005,
> leading to a renewed interest in his work.
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: jforjames at aol.com
> To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> Sent: Monday, May 05, 2008 8:56 PM
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: laureate
>
>
>
> even Lowell during Vietnam--he served one stint, in 1947-8).
>
>  --
>  I didn't realize this. Wasn't Lowell a CO during WWII? That would've make
> him a controversial pick on the heels of the war years.
>  Finnegan
>
>
>
>  --
>
> David Bircumshaw
> Website and A Chide's Alphabet
> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
> The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
> Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
>
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>



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