♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -When Robert Lowell was awarded 1960's National Book Award, critics praised him for bringing a new informality and immediacy to American poetry.

Lowell showed how poems could include the fresh news on your doorstep, from Eisenhower's latest policies.. to L.L.

Bean's latest catalogue... to the latest developments and treatments he received for his acute bipolar disorder.

♪♪ -He was hospitalized close to 20 times for psychosis, and he never knew when it was going to come back.

-Confessional poetry, confessing your own mental state -- this seems very, very private, but at the same time, Lowell becomes a kind of public poet.

-He became quite active politically, and a lot of it was around opposition to the war in Vietnam.

♪♪ -The public and the private are always coming together in Lowell, and that, to me, is his greatness as a poet.

-Robert Lowell needs no introduction here, nor anywhere else.

As the leading poet to emerge after World War II, he's known everywhere in the world.

We're happy to welcome him back to Washington.

Mr. Robert Lowell.

[ Applause ] ♪♪ -"July in Washington."

"The stiff spokes of this wheel touch the sore spots of the earth.

On the Potomac, swan-white power launches keep breasting the sulphurous wave.

Otters slide and dive and slick back their hair, raccoons clean their meat in the creek.

On the circles, green statues ride like South American liberators above the breeding vegetation..." -To explore how Robert Lowell harnessed his personal suffering to write poems of enduring national relevance, I've brought together seven interpreters -- three distinguished journalists, a senior White House adviser, a Capitol Hill staffer, a distinguished poetry scholar, and a Lowell biographer and expert on bipolar disorder.

[ Overlapping voices ] With them, I read Robert Lowell's great poem "July in Washington."

♪♪ -"The stiff spokes of this wheel touch the source spots of the earth."

-D.C. is oriented around "the circle."

The main circle is the Capitol building.

-Obviously a reference to the famous laying out of the city of Washington, D.C., in the form of a series of circles with roads going between them like the spokes of a wheel.

-Pierre L'Enfant's design for the "Federal City" took inspiration from classical and later European capital cities, where the glory of the nation was expressed in statues of heroes and a city plan oriented to the center of power.

♪♪ -This is really about the role Washington plays in the far corners of the earth.

I had the privilege to work in the White House, and you felt like you were at the hub of the world.

Events all over the world were on your radar screen.

♪♪ -"The stiff spokes of this wheel" is a very masculine image -- the American projection of power.

"Touch the sore spots of this earth."

-"The sore spots of the earth" are these painful points that this giant wheel of Washington just rolls over without any regard.

-So you might think of it as, like, an imperial city in a sense because there are all of these spokes around the world touching every corner of an empire.

♪♪ -Lowell's deep study of the classics -- of Greece, the original democracy, and Rome, a republic and global empire -- made him all too aware that even great nations may overreach and decline.

♪♪ -In his writings, he could just dive into Roman times.

That kind of historic imagination builds into your life a certain sense of cycles, because -- the cycles of ruins, the cycles of great civilizations.

-But Lowell's illness was also cyclic, and he had periods of psychosis in which he rampaged through history as an emperor or god.

-The kind of mania that he had was power.

When he was so manic, he thought he was Julius Caesar.

He thought he was Christ.

He thought he was Achilles.

He thought he was Alexander the Great.

♪♪ -When Lowell was in prep school, his rages earned him the nickname "Cal" -- short for Caliban or Caligula.

Caliban is the mad creative in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" -- enslaved, angry, but touched by nobility.

Caligula, though, is the tyrant -- aristocratic and cruel, in whom Lowell at his lowest sees himself.

♪♪ -Lowell lived in Washington for a long time as Poetry Consultant.

♪♪ He also spent very early years of his life in Washington when his father was a naval officer.

His relationship with Washington is -- You know, I think he loved it.

I'm a Washingtonian, obviously, so I think it's a staggeringly beautiful city.

♪♪ -"On the Potomac, swan-white power launches keep breasting the sulphurous wave."

♪♪ -The swan is a symbol of gracefulness, of purity.

-There's the obvious suggestion of -- at least on the surface -- of sort of pristine.

You want your power launch to be pristine and to be well cared for and swan-white.

-Everything here is built of this marble and white stone.

And it's gorgeous.

It has this fantastic effect.

But it's also saying, you know, what's it hiding?

What's inside of it?

[ Siren wails ] -But "power launches" is also a sort of double entendre.

-Yes.

Exactly.

On the one hand, it's a picture-postcard image of little motorboats, people out in recreation on the river.

But those words like "power launch" are suggesting what comes out of the Pentagon, which is, you know, quite close to that river.

♪♪ -Washington feels like a swamp in part because it is literally reclaimed swamp.

[ Chuckles ] There's a line in the poem about "sulphurous waves."

And sometimes you can sort of just smell the sort of swampy, sort of misty vibes.

♪♪ -"Otters slide and dive and slick back their hair, raccoons clean their meat in the creek."

-I was trying to interpret how much he was talking about the Washington that existed outside of the political realm and how much he was creating a metaphor for politics.

So it's not just otters who do that in Washington.

There are humans who do that.

-You almost think of these otters sliding and diving as politicians slicking back their hair.

-You think of, like, the slick power broker.

-"Cleaning their meat in the creek" was very funny because I saw this as an attempt by Washingtonians to take something that is, you know, kind of dirty and bloody and wash it and make it cleaner so it looks more presentable.

♪♪ When I think of July in Washington, I think about places I would rather be than Washington.

-It's hot and unpleasant.

People are always patting their forehead to try to get the sweat off.

-It is swampy in terms of climate, and it's sometimes swampy in terms of politics.

♪♪ -"On the circles, green statues ride like South American liberators above the breeding vegetation --" ♪♪ -"Breeding vegetation" is fantastic because things do grow in this heat -- wildly and excessively.

It feels like you can hear them growing almost.

♪♪ -What I found interesting was the contrast.

You have these regal statues, and then you have this sort of feral vegetation which is just sort of tropical and loose.

You get that contrast of the organic and the constructed.

The artifice and the organic.

♪♪ -Lowell's many drafts of "July in Washington" show him seeking the proper form to convey the city's mix of classical order and tropical sprawl.

They also show how Lowell's mania fertilized his artistic process.

-When he was manic, he would be just filling up notebooks and, you know, pages, and they would be all over the floor, and he'd be busy in the way of that chaotic busy-ness of mania.

He had this capacity to just bring up ideas, have them scampering across fields and -- and following them like rabbits and then bring them in.

He always had depressions that followed.

And during the depressions, and then when he was normal, he rewrote and rewrote and rewrote with blinding discipline.

-Eventually, Lowell organizes the chaos, arranging his poem into 10 stately couplets.

-"On the circles, green statues ride like South American liberators."

-Often in those circles in Washington, there are statues.

I think there's one of Bolivar somewhere.

-The statue of Simón Bolivar was put up in one of the Washington circles in the 1950s to sort of celebrate the liberation of much of South America from the Spanish empire.

-The "South American liberators."

I think that that's really a reference to Columbus or the original explorers.

♪♪ -Washington, D.C., the District of Columbia, was named in tribute to Christopher Columbus, who led the Spanish empire to the New World.

Whether liberator or imperial colonizer, Lowell's reference leaves open, but it raises questions of the United States' own imperial ambitions.

♪♪ -"Prongs and spearheads of some equatorial backland that will inherit the globe."

-"Prongs and spearheads" is imagery that is often used to describe missiles and ICBMs.

The tip of the spear for American defense.

-The United States was exerting its hegemony in ways that were deeply controversial.

-You saw assassinations all over the world.

You saw the Bay of Pigs where the U.S. tried to invade Cuba.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -There was a coup in Brazil, and it was thought to be at least an American-backed coup, a sort of right-wing junta, against a left-wing, democratically elected president.

-The many poems Lowell wrote about power.

You seem to be saying that this is sort of the struggle of his life.

-Yeah, I think -- For him, I think power was complicated.

It was an uncontrollable force.

I think he felt like America should be able to control these uncontrollable forces.

Uh, and he was not able to himself.

♪♪ -Having used the first five couplets of his poem to depict Washington's global reach, at the midpoint, Lowell effects a shift in theme and tone, turning to the smallness of electoral politics.

-It's a very funny city to people from any other city, I guess, in the world.

It's a city, first, of transients.

Everyone you know or at least have heard of seems to be here for a short time until he's sent home.

[ Laughter ] -"The elect, the elected... they come here bright as dimes, and die disheveled and soft."

-"Bright as dimes."

The sound of money clinking together is what makes Washington run.

-It's a superficial brightness but doesn't end up counting for much because a dime isn't worth very much.

Shiny, but not ultimately weighty.

-"They come here bright as dimes."

That could be "dime a dozen."

-But, also, it feels to me like it's a commentary on the New Frontier, JFK, "The Best and the Brightest."

Some people thought of the Kennedy government as Camelot.

-Lowell experienced Camelot firsthand, attending the famous state dinner of 1962 that mixed writers, musicians, and artists with those Kennedy officials who came to be called "The Best and the Brightest."

But in a letter to another guest, Lowell remarked, "It was all good fun, but by next morning, you read that the President might have invaded Cuba again."

♪♪ Lowell's drafts show him struggling to reconcile Washington's glamour and glitter with the nation's higher ideals -- the grand procession of democracy with the march of mere administrations.

♪♪ -"The elect, the elected..." To be a politician, you first have to choose yourself.

-My pedestrian appreciation for poetry includes Ogden Nash, who once said, "Whether elected or appointed, they consider themselves anointed."

I think there are people in Washington who after a while begin to feel like they were ordained to be there.

-"The elect" has that religious sense of "the chosen ones."

-It also reminds me of "the shining city on the hill"... -Absolutely.

Yeah.

-...which was used later to describe a vision of America.

-Lowell himself came from a Mayflower family.

He was Boston Brahmin, as they say.

Upper-class Bostonian.

They were Harvard professors and generals and Supreme Court judges.

James Russell Lowell, one of the most famous poets of 19th-century America.

Amy Lowell, another great poet.

♪♪ -As a descendent of the founding visionaries of New England, Lowell addressed poems to his abolitionist forebears and to even earlier ancestors.

"How close or how far," he asks, "Have we strayed from the original hope and promise of America?"

-Robert Lowell clearly loved America.

It was in his bloodlines forever.

But he had mixed reactions to being a Lowell.

He loved it and he hated it.

He resented it.

And he drew from it.

-His own family tree is rooted in America's oldest soil, so when Lowell crafts the image of generations blurring together like the rings of a tree, it is both personal and national.

♪♪ -"We cannot name their names or number their dates -- circle on circle, like rings on a tree --" -The many earlier rings of the poem -- the wheels, the circles, the dimes -- are now gathered into one image of a long-growing republic whose promise remains unrealized.

♪♪ -You could say Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson.

Everyone remembers their names, and they're appropriately memorialized.

Then there's a whole other side of Washington.

No one really stops to visit these particular statues, and no one quite remembers who they're of.

And, of course, that would be true of 99%, presumably, of the politicians who come here in Washington.

-But while they are anonymous, the "rings on a tree" also tell us that it goes back forever.

♪♪ -In some ways, we all die disheveled and soft.

But the question is, during the journey, have you made a difference?

There are figures throughout our history and certainly in the period in which Lowell was writing who did things that made us a better country.

-It wasn't as if Washington didn't have things that were hopeful and grand and sort of the promise of American democracy.

-This was the time of the Freedom Riders.

-When was the March on Washington?

August of '63.

Civil Rights Bill and all these kinds of things.

King's speech.

There was high hopes and genuine hopes.

-But remember this was written in the middle of the Cold War.

-[ Speaking Russian ] -The U.S. and the Soviet Union vying for primacy.

-Ask what you can do for your country.

-Kennedy's message was being an American citizen is hazardous duty.

So he was being realistic but also suggesting that we have the power to grab the wheel of history and turn it.

♪♪ [ Ship horn blares ] -"But we wish the river had another shore, some further range of delectable mountains, distant hills powdered blue as a girl's eyelid."

♪♪ -That image locks it in its period.

You can just see that early '60 blue Maybelline eyeshadow.

-Yeah.

Well, remember the era in culture and politics.

Glamour was such a big part of it.

-"Powdered blue as a girl's eyelid" is, in a way, the cosmetic falsity.

-The blue is "as blue as a girl's eyelid."

So it's kind of romantic and distancing, but it also sort of just comes -- comes home.

-That blue is also the blue of the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah, which is just -- -Ah, of course.

♪♪ -"Some further range of delectable mountains."

And I guess that's from "Pilgrim's Progress."

-Very famous book -- "The Pilgrim's Progress" by John Bunyan, the great Puritan writer of the 17th century.

"Delectable mountains," in a sense, are heaven, paradise.

So this is the moment where Lowell imagines a better world, a more romantic world.

♪♪ -"It seems the least little shove would land us there that only the slightest repugnance of our bodies we no longer control could drag us back."

♪♪ -I think that Lowell left it extremely ambiguous.

-That would be consistent with who he is.

He was in a constant battle between light and dark.

-"That only the slightest repugnance of our bodies we no longer control could drag us back."

-Elected "bodies" is what came to mind.

I mean, it's both personal but also body politic.

-I read this as sort of the body of state, the body of our democracy.

-"It seems the least little shove would land us there."

It would seem that the least little shove would land us there, but he seems very doubtful because I don't think he thinks that we do control somehow our bodies enough to get back onto that vision of a beautiful republic.

-We are dragged back to the present, to the world of politics.

-This is a timeless poem because the story of America, the story of democracy, is always a battle between cynicism and idealism.

-He saw both sides of America.

Part of being a great artist, in general, but I think also part of having very strikingly different moods is to be able to see things in a complex way.

♪♪ Washington's important enough to him to write about it and important enough to be disillusioned by it and important enough to him to want something better for it.

♪♪ -"The stiff spokes of this wheel touch the sore spots of the earth.

On the Potomac, swan-white power launches keep breasting the sulphurous wave.

Otters slide and dive and slick back their hair, raccoons clean their meat in the creek.

On the circles, green statues ride like South American liberators above the breeding vegetation -- prongs and spearheads of some equatorial backland that will inherit the globe.

The elect, the elected... they come here bright as dimes, and die disheveled and soft.

We cannot name their names, or number their dates -- circle on circle, like rings on a tree -- but we wish the river had another shore, some further range of delectable mountains, distant hills powdered blue as a girl's eyelid.

It seems the least little shove would land us there, that only the slightest repugnance of our bodies we no longer control could drag us back."

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