SOURCE: Pettingell, Phoebe. “Mad, Bad and Dangerous.” New Leader 65, no. 23 (13 December 1982): 24-5.

In the following review of Robert Lowell, Pettingell comments that Hamilton's biography “illuminates Lowell's poetry through a profound understanding of his life.”

The myth of the bard who is mad, bad and dangerous to know fascinates readers. Often poets fall under its malign spell, too, and feel they must live up to the part. But in Robert Lowell Ian Hamilton describes one who was a prisoner of cyclical breakdowns. Lowell himself once observed in a letter to his friend, John Berryman, “What queer lives we've had, even for poets! There seems something generic about it, and determined beyond anything we could do.”

Hamilton is a gripping narrator. His subject's history unfolds in these pages with the relentlessness of Elizabethan tragedy, punctuated by wild scenes and grand public gestures—including imprisonment as a conscientious objector during World...