Thinking about Robert Lowell made me remember something I once read about him, simultaneously amusing and sad, which I cannot now track down. I thought it may have been from Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth, but I found that book on a shelf in the basement, and it doesn't seem to be in there. I shall have to go by memory. Simpson's book, by the way, is enjoyable, and its title, from Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence"--"We poets in our youth begin in gladness;/But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness"--applies to the Lowell episode.
He was in the hospital with one of his bouts of mental illness. Some literary friends came to visit, and Lowell, in a manic state, began regaling them on one subject and another--including an "improved" version of Lycidas that he had undertaken. These friends listened politely as Lowell, with too much animation, described the project and recited for them long stanzas from his work-in-progress. When these friends left, they were more convinced than ever that Milton was a genius and that Lowell was indeed very disturbed.
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