1/16/2024 0 Comments Charles payne illness“Mania” means here what it often means colloquially-the head’s name for the heart’s excesses-but it is striking nonetheless: already, Lowell saw writing both as a way to understand his compulsions and as a compulsion in its own right, a roundabout leading out of trouble and immediately back in. This is a nineteen-year-old boy writing to Ezra Pound about his worship of Zeus. Its early stirrings are apparent in his letter to Pound: the sentences racing to match in number and variety the collections they describe, the grandiose gestures of self-deprecation, the hyperbolized confession of trifling sins. From his thirties on, Lowell suffered the relentless cycles of bipolar disorder, the “irritable enthusiasm” that lurched him upward before landing him in despair. It is hard not to be charmed by Lowell’s hyperventilating report on his agates and turtles and toy soldiers, but the word “mania” suggests that he suspected the darker fortunes to come. Pound, Lowell wrote, had re-created what he “imagined to be the blood of Homer” in “The Cantos.” (Parts of the poem had already been published.) Zeus and Achilles were “almost a religion” to him how could the “insipid blackness of the Episcopalian Church”-the faith of fashionable Boston-compete with the “whoring of Zeus and the savagery of the heroes?” The ambitious young man enclosed some poems for Pound, to bolster, as it were, his application.
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