Lowell

Alex Beam, the author of Gracefully Insane, probes the rich past of a mental hospital renowned for ministering to prominent, creative, and aristocratic patients
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Do you think that Lowell himself—a major poet who was genuinely sick—is part of the reason that the persona of the institutionalized poet took on a certain glamour?

Yes. Plath and Sexton were (to use a pretentious Harold-Bloomian-type word), self-consciously Lowell’s ephebes. He was a mentor to them and to a whole generation of poets. He was really one of the first self-identified public creative geniuses who wrestled with mental illness—mania in his case. / Atlantic Unbound | January 4, 2002