Damned Gifts MANIC POWER: ROBERT LOWELL AND HIS CIRCLE by Jeffrey Meyers Arbor House; 228 pages; $17.95

By Stefan Kanfer

When Charlotte Lowell's husband left home, she turned to her son. "Oh, Bobby," she told him, "it's such a comfort to have a man in the house." The eleven-year-old sharply reminded her, "I am not a man; I am a boy."

So he was, and so he remained. He was not alone. Robert Lowell's closest friends and fellow poets, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and Theodore Roethke, were also emotionally retarded. The poets, observes Jeffrey Meyers, "felt they should seek suffering rather than happiness . . . All four poets obsessively pursued their private myths, and persuaded each other and the public to believe them." Eventually, an inability to grow damaged the quartet beyond repair.

The Lowell group were the poetic heirs of the long-lived constellation of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost. Meyers, biographer of Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield and other troubled writers, persuasively argues that the younger men approached their predecessors "in depth of genius and artistic achievement" but "surpassed them in the extremity of pain." Meyers' fever chart begins with blighted childhoods: each man lost his father young. Each was severely disturbed, opening his psychic wounds and bleeding into confessional verse. But they all went a step beyond, steeping in self- pity, some sabotaging their marriages with meaningless affairs, others sniping at colleagues and then placing blame elsewhere. "American society would drive anybody out of his skull," fumed Berryman.

Meyers' ingenious group portrait shows his subjects linked by a kinship of misery. Colleagues praised Roethke's hectic, incandescent verse and gossiped about his violent breakdowns. He described his electroshock therapy in rhyme: "Swift's servant beat him./ Now they use/ A current flowing/ From a fuse." The jolts were useless. He died of a sudden heart attack at 55. Jarrell was not content to be the best poetry reviewer of his time, says Meyers, "he had to be a great, perhaps the greatest poet -- or he was nothing." It was during one dark time that the writer, 51, fell under the path of a moving car.

Berryman was next. After heated sonnets on the subject of suicide, the 57- year-old leaped off a bridge: "In a modesty of death I join my father" said one of his late poems. Lowell once noted that he and his friends "go at it with such single-minded intensity that we are always on the point of drowning." Now the survivor lost the will to compete. When he suffered his last heart attack at 60, his third wife called it a "suicide wish." In "Middle Age," he had written, "I forgive/ those I/ have injured!"

These melancholy accounts ought to signify a collective failure. Yet as Manic Power shows, the four men found an odd consolation in catastrophe, savoring their roles as the Bards Damned by Their Gifts, perennial favorites since the abbreviated days of Byron, Shelley and Keats. The tragedy of Lowell and his circle is not that they were martyrs to an unfeeling society, but that they played their parts too fervently. As each man drew closer to his finale, he discovered too late that it was impossible to remove the mask.