SOURCE: Thwaite, Anthony. “Madness and Authority.” Spectator 250 (14 May 1983): 21-2.

In the following review of Robert Lowell, Thwaite describes the biography as “a considerable achievement,” asserting that it is “one of the best literary biographies of a modern writer I have ever read.”

In 1966 Robert Lowell remarked in a letter: ‘John B. in his mad way keeps talking about something evil stalking us poets. That's a bad way to talk, but there's truth in it.’ ‘John B.’ is of course John Berryman. Six years after that letter, he jumped off a bridge in Minneapolis. Five years after Berryman's suicide, Lowell died of a heart attack in a New York taxi, after a life of cyclical manic visitations.

Berryman was the subject of John Haffenden's enormous biography last year, and in Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth, published at the same time, he shared the stage with Lowell, Jean Stafford...