Includes bibliographical references (pages 431-510) and index.

Prologue: Old Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 19, 1845 ; "The trouble with writing poetry" -- I. Introduction: Steel and fire -- No tickets for that altitude -- The archangel loved heights -- II. Origins: The puritanical iron hand of constraint -- Sands of the unknown -- This dynamited brook -- A brackish reach -- III. Illness: The kingdom of the mad -- In flight, without a ledge -- Snow-sugared, unraveling -- Writing takes the ache away -- IV. Character: How will the heart endure? -- With all my love, Cal -- And will not scare -- V. Illness and art: Something altogether lived -- A magical orange grove in a nightmare -- Words meat-hooked from the living steer -- VI. Mortality: Come; I bell thee home -- Life blown towards evening -- Bleak-boned with survival -- He is out of bounds now -- Appendix I: Psychiatric records of Robert Lowell -- Appendix II: Mania and depression: clinical description, diagnosis and nomenclature -- Appendix III: Medical history of Robert Lowell (by Thomas Traill, FRCP).

"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry, Robert Lowell (1917-1977) put his manic-depressive illness into the public domain. Now Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison brings her expertise to bear on his story, illuminating the relationship between bipolar illness and creativity, and examining how Lowell's illness and the treatment he received came to bear on his work. His New England roots, early breakdowns, marriages to three eminent writers, friendships with other poets, vivid presence as a teacher and writer refusing to give up in the face of mental illness--Jamison gives us Lowell's life through a lens that focuses our understanding of the poet's intense discipline, courage, and commitment to his art. Jamison had unprecedented access to Lowell's medical records, as well as to previously unpublished drafts and fragments of poems, and was the first biographer to speak to his daughter. With this new material and a psychologist's deep insight, Jamison delivers a sympathetic account of a poet who was--both despite and because of mental illness--a passionate, original observer of the human condition." -- Provided by publisher.