Kay Redfield Jamison, a MacArthur Fellow and author of the standard text on manic-depressive illness and many other studies on the subject, begins her book by denying that she has written a biography. Since she is dealing with an individual and with the major episodes of his life, how is this not a biography? She does not say. But I presume she is thinking of biography as a chronological narrative that includes not just the major, but also many of the minor details of a subject’s life as part of a complete account. She does not say anything, really, about biography as a genre, except implicitly in her attack on Ian Hamilton’s Lowell biography, which many of Lowell’s friends, according to Jamison, dislike, and which she represents as having done a disservice to its subject.

The brief against Hamilton is that he makes too much of Lowell’s mental breakdowns and presents—especially toward the end of the poet’s life, when Hamilton knew him—a condemnatory view of the man that injured Lowell’s reputation. I was taken aback, since my impression, formed over many years, is that critics rank Hamilton’s biography highly. How much a biography really damages its subject is debatable. Did Lawrence Thompson’s Frost biography, often cited as a negative narrative, really do much, if anything, to diminish the poet’s reputation? In a few cases, of course, a biography