In 1957, American Poet Laureate Robert Lowell (March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) wrote to his "favorite poet and favorite friend," Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) the line: "I see clearly now that for the last few days, I have been living in a state of increasing mania - almost off the rails at the end. My disease, alas, gives one a headless heart."

The two poets, giants of mid-twentieth century American poetry, had met a decade earlier when Lowell was thirty and Bishop thirty-six. Their friendship lasted thirty years until Lowell's death in 1977. They exchanged letters of touching and unadorned honesty, intelligence, love, and support. They never progressed the relationship into marital formality, mainly because Bishop had always been with women (she never called it anything other than that), and Lowell sought in vain for a moment to ask for anything more. 

The alacrity with which the mind can right itself when it is grossly disturbed, like a cat landing on all fours, never ceases to amaze me. The methods we use to calm and quiet the raging mind are deeply personal yet have commonality. Lowell had manic-depression, what we now call Bipolar I. I return to him in September, like a retreat. This time reading him makes me think of writing —the physical act of writing. A conscious mind hitched to the pen, the pen's movement on paper, paper responsive. I have Bipolar II, which means constant, exhausting energy swings. Less brutal than what Lowell would have experienced but increased in frequency. Sometimes, I scribble in my notebook when I'm highly emotional and energetic. Letting the pen map and release emotion. It is merely markings, movement, forcefulness, and deliberateness, but glyphic. Tearing through the paper in force. I've torn the paper. What used to be paper. The pen is hot. A form of writing and communicating. Helping the mind ease its "overriding restlessness."

 Robert Lowell's scorching gaze.

Lowell took a similar approach. On August 9, 1957, after letters speaking of feeling "wavery" and hinting at an increasingly overwrought mind (a language that speaks to me and makes me nod my head), Lowell wrote to his beloved friend:

I see clearly now that for the last few days, I have been living in a state of increasing mania - almost off the rails at the end. It almost seems as if I couldn't be with you any length of time without acting with abysmal myopia and lack of consideration. My disease, alas, gives one (during its seizures) a headless heart.

I am not going to write very much now, but I do want you and Lota to know that I am at least in reverse. I am taking my anti-manic pills - 75 mgs. of Sparine, no more than what my doctor prescribed on the bottle, but too much to drive a car or even see people much. The effect is something like the slowing and ache of a medium fever. One's thoughts are not directly changed and healed, but the terrible, overriding restlessness of one's system is halted so the mind can see life as it is.

Mania is an existence where emotive energy outstrips the mind's physical and communicative abilities to express or contain it. (Like my notebook scribbles. I say scribbles, but they are physical attacks on the paper. Hollowing out the pulp to mimic my combusting mind.) We take up pens to release and communicate. Lowell had several manic episodes and wrote from them. 

Bishop, who was living in Rio de Janeiro at the time with her lover Lota, responded immediately to comfort her manic friend.

Dear Cal, do please, please take care of yourself and be an ornament to the world (you're already that) and comfort to your friends ... It seems to me in our conversations we just did the ground-work and never got onto the more constructive and hopeful parts of things. - There are many hopeful things, too, you know. Sobriety & gayety & patience & toughness will do the trick. Or so I hope for myself and hope & pray for you, too.

Lowell replies to Bishop with one of his longest letters, a wavering, billowing paragraph after paragraph tome with scarce breath. He even admits, "The last part is too heatedly written with too many and so forth."

On September 11, Lowell writes again. His opening phrase, "writing at poems," suggests the same physicality that I sometimes feel: boring into the paper, boring into the words.

I've been furiously writing at poems and spent the whole blue and golden Maine days in my bedroom with a ghastly utility bedside lamp on, my pajamas turning oily with sweat, and I have six poems started. They beat the big drum too much.

In the winter of the same year, Lowell was hospitalized in an institution outside Boston. While there, he wrote his most personal and my most cherished poem "Waking in the Blue." Lowell's fiercely observant visual map of the institution (incidentally, I was also there years and years ago - he remembered blue, I remember orange) gives us a physical bearing for his rupture. The metal shaving mirrors. Upon meeting it, the face's light ruptures and returns in some distorted Francis Bacon concoction.

The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My heart grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the 'mentally ill.')
From "Waking in the Blue"
Read full poem here.

Lowell did not write Bishop again until March 15, 1958, but she continued to correspond about her life and thoughts and mentioned that she hoped to hear from him. If she knew he was hospitalized from other channels and connections, she did not say.

Finally, in mid-March, Lowell writes to Bishop that he has recovered and hopes to leave the hospital. Bishop replies she knows it is a good place with good doctors and has even visited people there. 

"Brambles" by my dear friend Mel Barrett, 2022. To me, it is a visual of the hot, luminous, tangled mind of the manic-depressive.

Lowell was no stranger to self-confession; he pioneered the American confessional poetry genre. He wrote about the self and opened up about his pain, the kind of blatant openheartedness we take for granted and even disparage today. 

It is critical to have an intellectualized eye to mental illness. What it looks like feels like because it allows those who approach it pragmatically to deal with it successfully. But the emotion is real, overwhelming. Sometimes emotion is all there is. Take a moment, reread Lowell's words, visualize one of the most influential 20th-century poets, a long line of Boston royalty, which was American royalty, which was thus New World royalty, feeling so untethered, so boiling in energy he was, in his words, "like a child that could not sit down."

I end with a few suggestions about the solace of writing, movement, and communication. From the boundaries of the unsayable, the reuse of overused words, and our compulsive need to exhale and expel. Or dive into the complete correspondence Words in the Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, thoughtfully edited by Modern poetry scholars Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton.