In light of all the clacking confessional prose and poetry jockeying for views, it's hard to imagine people once, quite recently, never spoke of their private lives in public.

It's hard to fathom how original and influential Robert Lowell (March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) and his Life Studies would become to modern writing when published in 1959.

They're altogether otherworldly now,
those adults champing for their ritual Friday spin
to the pharmacist and five-and-tend in Brockton.
Back in my throw-away and shaggy span
of adolescence, Grandpa still waves his stick
like a policeman;
Grandmother, like a Mohammedan, still wears her thick
lavender mourning and touring veil,
the Pierce Arrow clears its throat in a horse-stall.
From "Grandparents"

For centuries, confessionals of doubts, worries, malapropisms, and especially sins were best kept between man and God's agents. Or, at the very least, within a marriage.

That confessional poetry would take root in the buttoned-up 1950s, with a man born into Harvard-connected high society, major buildings at Harvard named after such a family, that it began with a man at all (surely, women kept diaries while men kept working journals full of insight) is extraordinary. Lowell's honesty undermined his own beginnings, opened the closed-door policy of high society, and brought an awareness of mental health issues that we take for granted today.

'A penny for your thoughts, Schopenhauer,' my mother would say.

'I am thinking about pennies,' I'd answer.

'When I was a child, I used to love telling Mama everything I had done,' Mother would say.
'But you're not a child,' I would answer.

I used to enjoy dawdling and humming. 'Anchors Aweigh' up Revere Street after a day at school... And yet my mind always blanked and seemed to fill with a clammy hollowness when Mother asked prying questions. Like other tongue-tied, difficult children, I dreamed I was a master of cool, stoical repartee.
From "91 Revere Street"

Many of the vignettes in Life Studies take place in the domestic setting, in Lowell's family and their Boston home.   Lowell's "91 Revere Street" was a prose piece about a townhouse in one of Boston's most prestigious neighborhoods, Beacon Hill. The home was the source of Lowell's mother's pride, his father's grimace, and, thus, Lowell's creative tension.     
As times changed and location became more pivotal to homes, the prices in Beacon Hill skyrocketed, and most of the townhouses were divided into apartments. I lived in one such apartment—on Revere Street, as it happens.     
Like attracts like, and in those days the small flats were full of young political aspirants who worked in the State House atop the hill. As far as I know, 91 Revere Street suffered the same fate.

In 1924 people still lived in cities. Late that summer, we bought the 91 Revere Street house, looking out on an unbuttoned part of Beacon Hill bounded by the North End slums, though reassuringly only four blocks away from my Grandfather Winslow's brown pillared house at 18 Chestnut Street. In the decades preceding and following the First World War, old Yankee families had upset expectation by regaining this section of the Hill from the vanguards of the lace-curtain Irish. This was bracing news for my parents in that topsy-turvy era when the Republican Party and what were called 'people of the right sort' were no longer dominant in the city elections.

[...]

Our Sunday dinner guests were often naval officers. Naval officers were not Mother's sort; very few people were her sort these days, and that was her trouble - a very authentic human, and plausible difficulty, which made Mother's life one of much suffering. She did not have the self-assurance for wide human experience; she needed to feel liked, admired, and surrounded by the approved and familiar. Her haughtiness and chilliness came from apprehension. She would start talking like a grande dame and then stand back rigid and faltering, as if she feared being crushed by her own massively intimidating offensive.

T. S. Eliot—born into the same Boston high society as Lowell three decades earlier —poured his pain and despair into verse and launched a new, modern way of thinking and writing into the world. He also created the modern character J. Alfred Prufrock, a feckless, forlorn, unrequited, and wretched man.   Lowell saw his father as a sort of Prufrock. But it is Lowell's mother, like the mothers of many writers, who received the most polished description."She did not have the self-assurance for wide human experience."     
Lowell writes, "She needed to feel liked, admired, surrounded by the approved and familiar."     
His intense observations reminds me of John Cleese's portrayal of his mother: a woman only at home inside her home.   
Read more in my collection "What We Write About When We Write About Our Mothers."

Decades later, Lowell, who felt similar existential emptiness, wrote differently in Life Studies. No more 'patients etherized on tables'; his language was direct, and his pain was impossible to miss. But there was something about the Prufrock in his verse.  Lowell suffered from manic depression and was checked into McLean Hospital in Boston several times. Lowell's "Waking in the Blue" captures the essence of this experience:

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.

This poem is significant to me. Lowell talks about the metal shaving mirrors and remembers blue corridors. I've suffered from manic depression (now called bipolar) for decades, and, like Lowell, I went to McLean after a manic episode—a heeded cry for help, I like to call it.

I don't think of it often and never speak of it, but I remember orange. Walls, uniforms—was I orange, too? McLean was orange. Does color shape our memories?

London twilight. Color embellishes our memories. Joan Didion spoke of living in "blue" after her daughter died. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Anyway, I remember the metal shaving mirror. Bent light into a Francis Bacon portrait. Mental illness does not make one more intelligent, artistic, or anything. Let's abandon that trope. It makes one suffer. What we do with that sorrow and suffering is up to the individual. 

Suppose mental illness does appear adjacent to creative genius—as it did for Lowell, William Styron, Arthur Rimbaud, John Clare, Edward Lear, and Virginia Woolf—it is likely because it sets us apart from society in such a way that we can better reflect it. We are the metal shaving mirrors.   In his rather sensational work The Outsider writer Colin Wilson argues that the Outsider is a misunderstood member of society who must create in order to self-understand. While that may be, it is also the case that mental illness exists sometimes simultaneously, a truth Wilson mostly ignored.

Lowell was very much "apart" from his parents, first and foremost. And yet, there is something in his poetry that feels like home.