The maples in Harvard Yard were starting to turn and the whole world seemed golden. I’d just checked the bulletin board at Warren House and found my name on his list. Though I’d only read a few of his poems, I knew that Robert Lowell had won a Pulitzer Prize and it seemed to me that being accepted into his writing seminar was equivalent to being admitted into the fellowship of poets. For me, now twenty and a junior, the alternative had gaped large. What if, among aspiring student bards, I’d been spurned as unworthy—plucked up, as it were, and flung from the slopes of Mt. Parnassus into the murky depths where I’d sizzle away to nothing like a chunk of superfluous fat? With relief compounding my joy, my heart rose up and fluttered at the good news. I don’t want to say that Lowell’s actual class was a disappointment, but it wasn’t what I’d expected. We brought in mimeographed copies of our poems, passed them around and received the rather guarded appraisal of our peers. Lowell himself, handsome, tall, self-conscious and ill-at-ease, would occasionally comment as well, picking out a phrase or a word-choice that struck him as “unusual,” which, in the case of my own poems, I took to mean good, though it might just as well have meant the opposite. Sometimes his bony hand would hover over the page as though waiting for a sign, but when the spark came it often launched him on a tangent, bringing to mind a poem by Dickinson, Eliot or Empson that he was more interested in talking about than anything in the half-formed student work before us. Often the class took an odd spin, as if we were there to amuse and stimulate him rather than to be taught. In a sense, he became the subject of the class, since he was showing us how a real poet’s mind worked, and that was fine with me. I observed his gestures—how his index finger would circle thoughtfully, as if stirring a cup of coffee, as he worked through a literary paradox or called up another marvelous poet we must read. He introduced the work of his friends and rivals, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, and Philip Larkin, and brought forward older poets who piqued his interest like Yeats, Tennyson, and even, on one occasion, Kipling. He treated the great dead as if they were still alive, mocking any questionable phrasing and pointing out bold images and ingenious structural moves as if they’d been authored by an upstart contemporary he needed to come to grips with. Because he’d noted an oblique connection to my work, I read John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, just out, and reviewed it glowingly for the Advocate. He also passed around mimeographed copies of some of Sylvia Plath’s final poems, since he was writing the introduction to his former student’s astonishing collection Ariel at the time. Phil Levine called Lowell one of the worst teachers he ever had, but I never regretted being in his class, although, in all honesty, I can’t say that he taught me much about writing poetry. Even after I’d taken his seminar a second time in my senior year, my style remained a clotted pastiche of phrases that I considered literary and impressive, and when I got to Iowa, the poet George Starbuck held out the sheaf of my undergraduate work as if it gave off a rancid odor, and asked me bluntly: “Why are you writing this stuff?” Lowell held back his criticism, conscious perhaps of the destructive weight it might carry. Deferring to his students’ sensitivities, he let our blunders slide rather than pan a misjudged phrase or malformed stanza and risk snapping a bud off at the stem. Poetry, for him, was not just a craft but a calling or a zone of consciousness and he believed that those of us who might eventually turn into poets would have to learn to make our way alone into that dream-haunted wood. “My mind’s not right,” Lowell announces in “Skunk Hour,” his famous poem about voyeurism and stubborn survival. We knew that he suffered from manic-depression and when he huddled in a corner of the seminar room, obsessively cleaning his glasses and rambling distractedly about Melville’s Captain Ahab as if he knew the man personally, he seemed close to the abyss. The poem “Walking in the Blue” deals with his detention in an upper crust sanitarium called McClean’s: Waking in the Blue 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.") What use is my sense of humor? I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties, once a Harvard all-American fullback, (if such were possible!) still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties, as he soaks, a ramrod with a muscle of a seal in his long tub, vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing. A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap, worn all day, all night, he thinks only of his figure, of slimming on sherbet and ginger ale— more cut off from words than a seal. This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean's; the hooded night lights bring out "Bobbie," Porcellian '29, a replica of Louis XVI without the wig— redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale, as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit and horses at chairs. These victorious figures of bravado ossified young. In between the limits of day, hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle of the Roman Catholic attendants. (There are no Mayflower screwballs in the Catholic Church.) After a hearty New England breakfast, I weigh two hundred pounds this morning. Cock of the walk, I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey before the metal shaving mirrors, and see the shaky future grow familiar in the pinched, indigenous faces of these thoroughbred mental cases, twice my age and half my weight. We are all old-timers, each of us holds a locked razor. The form of this poem, occasionally rhyming free verse, came as a shock in the 1950s, when Lowell who’d been considered a strict formalist, first published it. And the subject—his stay in McLeans, a mental hospital—was also considered out-of-line for a poem by many of the academic critics of those times. We’re less shocked today, in part because the poems in Skunk Hour helped widen the scope of what poets could write about. As a result, Lowell’s innovations have lost some of their force. Ironically, his influence on younger poets like Plath and Sexton made his own work seem less original. “Waking in the Blue” takes on an amused tone as it recounts the appearance and foibles of a group of upper crust mental cases. Another feature of the poem is that it’s full of animal references. Horses, whales, seals and crows are invoked and the puns in “mare’s nest,” “catwalk,” “turtlenecked” and “thoroughbred” serve to reinforce the poem’s animal imagery, suggesting that McLeans is a kind of zoo and that everyone housed there, including Lowell, who describes himself as “cock of the walk,” is in a sense sub-human. The locked razors at the end of the poem indicates that they’re not trusted. In this world, self-mutilation, even suicide, are possible. In November of my senior year, Lowell had to return to McClean’s and for the rest the semester, William Alfred, Lowell’s steady friend, a scholar and a successful playwright, filled in. Alfred had a gentle, monkish quality, with a bit of an Irish lilt to his voice and a fringe of graying hair around an egg-shaped dome. He took a more personal interest in his students than Lowell had and asked what my plans were following graduation. I said that I wanted to write but had no specific plans. He brought up the Vietnam War and said he’d heard good things about Iowa’s graduate writing program, pointing out that I’d be able to maintain my student deferment there. It was at Iowa that I first gave proper attention to Robert Lowell’s poetry, which became, and remains, an important influence on my work. Even today, reading Life Studies, I can hear his oddly southern drawl (though he came from Boston, of course), picking out choice words and dwelling on favorite phrases, as if he were discovering them for the first time. Unlike his oracular early poems, these have an off-beat, mandarin style, as if bemused with his own madness, his own griefs. In 1965, Lowell turned down an invitation to the White House and attacked American policy in Vietnam, helping to launch the anti-war movement. Later, on lithium, he would overcome his mania and live out his life as a jet-setter, taking part in several political campaigns and writing prolifically but not nearly as well. I remember my grief tinged with anger when he died, and I recall sitting in a bar in Juneau, Alaska, on a misty November day, accusing him of abusing his talent and of failing to teach me what finally I had needed to teach myself.