In 1954, Robert Lowell entered the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York City after a brutal manic episode following his mother’s death. While there, he wrote about his hopes for the future: ‘I suffer from periodic wild manic explosions that are followed by long hangovers of formless self-pity. What I ask of psychotherapy is that these extremes be cured, or at least moderated, and that in the future I will be in a position to take quick preventative measures and never again lose control.’ Encouraged by his psychiatrists, Lowell began writing autobiographical essays at Payne Whitney as, in his words, a ‘way to get well’. He continued writing in this vein until 1957, at which point prose became a dead end and he began composing the autobiographical poems of his watershed collection, Life Studies (1959). The two major prose pieces he wrote during this period, ‘My Autobiography’ and ‘The Balanced Aquarium’, are both included in their original forms in Memoirs. In these pieces, Lowell was not writing for an audience. Rather, he was writing for himself as a kind of ‘psychotherapy’ that he hoped would help him heal. ‘I want to live the life I have – married, teaching, writing,’ he wrote at Payne Whitney. ‘I want to be able to see my faults, do something about them, and be a good husband, a writer who can grow, and a steady, capable teacher.’ This quotidian desire is at the heart of the long prose pieces in Memoirs, most of which have been gathering dust in Boston archives for nearly fifty years.

Lowell’s biographers have argued that he arrived at the looser, more autobiographical style of Life Studies after a West Coast reading tour that put him in touch with the Beat movement. Memoirs suggests a different, more personal route: that some of Lowell’s most important poetry, like that of