For a biographer of skill, it is a regrettable feature of lives that they move in one direction. A subject is born, a subject ages, a subject dies. There is room for flashbacks and padded digressions, but the trap can be worked in only so many ways. Lives are difficult to follow if a person marries after dying from excess drink, or learns to talk after graduating from university. The plot slackens in the wrong places; motivations seem scrambled. And so most biographies march from cradle to grave, stringing together one episode after the next until the subject ceases to exist, and so too the purpose for the book.It is one of the first artful moves in Kay Redfield Jamison’s Setting the River on Fire that she forgoes the premise of biography. Her book, she says, is “not a biography” but rather a “psychological account of the life and mind of Robert Lowell” (5). This releases her from the cradle-to-grave obligations that come with the territory, and allows her to write, instead, a highly unusual dual-portrait of poet and illness: Lowell and manic-depression (or bi-polar disorder, as it is now commonly called). Jamison’s book lurches across epochs, disciplines, and wheels around Lowell’s own life in ways that would be inadvisable in less able hands, but in hers makes not only for the most comprehensive, stylish, and sensitive portrait to date of Robert Lowell but one of the best life studies in recent memory.The book is framed, partially, as a corrective to Ian Hamilton’s 1982 biography, which, as Jamison notes, rapidly accelerated the decline of Lowell’s reputation. “The Lowell that Hamilton chose to portray,” she writes, “is loutish, mad, humorless, a snob, and an overrated poet. There is much detail about Lowell’s breakdowns but relatively little about how his illness affected his poetry” (9). This is precisely where Setting the River on Fire steps in. Jamison considers the relationship between the life and the poems without either sensationalizing the manic episodes—the straight-jackets and Napoleonic visions—or using the illness to over-determine her readings of the poetry. Instead, she layers in sections on the history of mania and the thread of illness running through Lowell’s family line, allowing the poems to accrue a natural sort of depth.Jamison is a celebrated clinical psychologist who has written about manic-depression for over three decades, not only co-authoring one of the major textbooks on the subject (1993’s Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament) but exploring both its relationship to literature and its place in her own life, as she suffered from bipolar disorder for much of her adulthood. Jamison is also a highly astute reader of literature (she was made an Honorary Professor of English at St. Andrews in 1997) and writes prose that is decisively poetic—a bit lofty and overworked at times but often incantatory and powerful.What the other biographers did not have access to—neither Hamilton nor Paul Mariani—is the approval of Harriet Lowell, the daughter of Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell. Harriet not only granted Jamison the first and only interview about her parents (to my knowledge), but gave Jamison access to Lowell’s medical records, which contain detailed psychiatric reports of his time spent in clinics and hospitals. Harriet also let her examine the contents of the briefcase Lowell had with him in the taxicab on the afternoon of September 12, 1977, when he died on the way to Hardwick’s apartment from Kennedy Airport. In the briefcase: his glasses, a checkbook, a note from Elizabeth Bishop, and a list from Roosevelt Hospital that itemizes the objects he was carrying when he died, as well as a red notebook, previously unexamined, that contains over 200 pages of notes and poems, some of which were included in Day by Day. (One wonders why the notebook, which dates from 1973 and covers that crucial year of The Dolphin affair—with its emotional havoc and prize-giving—was the one he was carrying with him in 1977.) Jamison avails herself of all of these new materials, as well as interviews and extensive research of Lowell’s ancestry, to give a new and vibrant reading of his life.At the book’s core is the binary of manic depression itself. Lowell’s years, especially after his first hospitalization in 1949, were structured by the cycle of illness: the acceleration of mania, with its frenetic blasts, its rushes of words and images and delusions; and the crash of depression, the low and stuck self-loathing mood, the months of regret and penitential feeling. “To be in the grip of mania,” Jamison writes, “is to experience the unimaginable, try the unthinkable, do the unforgivable. The depressed mind is entirely different; it surveys darkly. It ruminates on the raw, generally unusable work that spills out during manic fertility. The depressed mind criticizes, revises, prunes, censors, improves” (278).The binary of manic depression is not unrelated to the warring impulses that Lowell saw as essential to his poetry: the world of old New England, chastened and Puritanical; and the fire of the poet, untrammeled and brightly burning. In a cited 1959 letter to Elizabeth Bishop, he wrote: “My trouble seems to be to bring together in me the Puritanical iron hand of constraint and the gushes of pure wildness. One can’t survive or write without both but they need to come to terms. Rather narrow walking” (27). Mania and depression, poetry and New England, gushing and revising—they were tightly coiled in a mind that was always surveying itself, lunging impulsively and then stepping back to observe the beauty and wreckage. One recalls that final line from “Dolphin” as a sort of résumé for the poet: “my eyes have seen what my hand did.”Opinions about Lowell’s cruelty often devolve into murky reflections on agency. How much is a person responsible for injuring other people—like assaulting Jean Stafford or driving Hardwick nearly to suicide or locking Caroline Blackwood in her flat for days—if they are mentally ill? One thing that this book establishes, even if Jamison’s aim is to offer a more balanced portrait of Lowell, is that he did not just suffer from mania but tended to fetishize it. When he was admitted to the Massachusetts Mental Healthcare Center in 1957, after having just churned out many of the poems that would go into Life Studies, it was clear to the psychiatrist, Dr. Marian Woolston, not only that Lowell was drunk on the prospect of his own greatness but also that he was attached to his own illness. “There is undue preoccupation with greatness,” Woolston wrote, “almost a sense of mission in making a new contribution. He has a great need to be not only good but unique among poets [. . .]” (15). It was his “prevailing tone,” according to Woolston, that “suggest[ed] the desirability of psychosis as a qualification for great artistry” (139).Lowell, at different points, not only thought he was on par with Dante but that he literally was Dante—or T.S. Eliot or Shakespeare or Homer, depending on the manic episode. As much as this “undue preoccupation with greatness” is repellant, it was part of Lowell’s genius. One of the most widely remarked upon features of his intelligence, among friends and colleagues, is that he was not only a student of history but seemed to live coterminously with it. “Surfacing constantly in what Cal says, are touchstones from all levels of history,” said his friend, the poet Philip Booth. “Cal is like an archeologist at a dig-site; there are ages and ages under him” (16). Another friend wrote that Revolutionary America, the Renaissance, Rome—all were “contemporary to him.” Esther Brooks described how, in a conversation with Lowell, he “built mental pyramids, tore them down, discoursed on the habits of wolves, the Punic Wars, Dante, Napoleon, Shakespeare, Alexander the Great, politics, his friends, religion, his work, or the great noyade at Nantes” (7).What is difficult to say, and Jamison does say it in so many words, is that Lowell’s poetry was aided by the illness. Not simply the subject-matter of poems like “High Blood” or “Waking Early Sunday Morning” or “Skunk Hour” that feature a mind cracking, or a day on a psych ward, but the lexical and imagistic richness of his entire body of work. Two symptoms of the manic phase of manic-depressive illness, for instance, are “clang associations”—speech that links words together with similar sounds without logical coherence—and hallucinations: both of which Lowell seems to have experienced in spades. The point is not that the illness made Lowell a great poet but that it nourished the poems. (Assuming we preserve the idea of mental illness as separable from the mind it affects.) Lowell’s was a uniquely wired, technicolor mind that operated in metaphors—“[m]etaphor was his reality, not the original fact” (7), said Esther Brooks—and churned out slanted associations and spectacular images. As Lowell later recalled of his 1949 breakdown in Bloomington, Indiana:Lowell was fearful of his illness and intoxicated by it. For every surge of poems, there were the rounds of electroconvulsive therapy, the chlorpromazine, and later the lithium, which saved him in some ways but deadened him in others. It was both a tax and an inheritance. Jamison shows madness passing through the family line, from Harriet Brackett Spence Lowell, his great-great-grandmother, down through Amy and James Russell and Percival, and all the way to Robert. Every time we return to his poems there is almost a sense of over-exposure: of having seen too much, of knowing too much. It is hard to recall a book that so closely brings us to the heat of a writer’s mind, that binds the life to the words. As Lowell wrote in “Night Sweat”: “one writing, one life!”