From the Book - First edition.
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
III. Illness: The kingdom of the mad
In flight, without a ledge
Writing takes the ache away
IV. Character: How will the heart endure?
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
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).
