SOURCE: "Robert Lowell's Breakdown," in Yale Review, Vol. 79, No. 2, Winter, 1990, pp. 172-87.

In the following essay, Hammer examines Lowell's artistic break from the influence of Allen Tate and the significance of Lowell's nervous breakdown as a metaphor for this schism as evident in Life Studies. "Lowell's 'breakdown' is itself a literary construction," according to Hammer.

In 1959, the year in which he published Life Studies, Robert Lowell remembered his first, unannounced arrival at the home of Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon as the beginning of his career: "My head was full of Miltonic, vaguely piratical ambitions. My only anchor was a suitcase, heavy with bad poetry. I was brought to earth by my bumper mashing the Tates' frail agrarian mailbox post. Getting out to disguise the damage, I turned my back on their peeling, pillared house. I had crashed the civilization of the South." And when we add that...