Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Thomas Travisano (Editor)

Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that "you ha[ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend."

The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters―they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977.

Presented in Words in Air is the complete correspondence between Bishop and Lowell. The substantial, revealing―and often very funny―interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Biography, Literature, History, Memoir, Biography Memoir

928 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956. and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are a Real Pair - what polite, well-bred, well-meaning but unnervingly demeaning and invidious folks used to call an odd couple.

Ain’t that cute!

Yeah, Pariahs.

But this deadly duo separately wrote the finest American poetry of the fabulous fifties, bringing it to stratospheric new heights of accomplishment.

Poets who were thinking outside of the box!

Both supremely intelligent, yet one producing a huge output of intense, probing, wide-Awake verse...

The other just as intense, but reticently producing a more measured output, keeping to her limits while daring sudden, jarring but minor extremes that you just have to notice!

“Pascal avait son Gouffre” and both of these giants had it, too.

Lowell blows the whole lid of it off all at once. Bishop is always more discreet.

Lowell goes for it like gangbusters.

Bishop sidesteps the sensational in favour of a Shattering ‘Mirror on which to dwell (check out Elliott Carter’s terrifying unveiling of that poem, in his incredible atonal song cycle of the same name!).’

https://youtu.be/8BT06Dwk3Y8?si=0ldGo...

But Baudelarian to the hilt, both of these fifties pariahs - now mainstream intellectual legends - had their weaknesses on display publicly to an appalled McCarthyist set of staid critics.

They didn’t mind, though, these two heroes.

They saw the reflection of each other’s brilliance in the other’s admiring eyes - that laughed right along with them - not at them (though Bishop had her limits...)!

We see her making wryly caustic comments about her best pen pal.that I, for one, can only echo.

Lowell’s so often over the top! Like me, alas.

But both were Geniuses of the Written Word.

So Robert, Elizabeth (though I’m a latecomer to you, Ms Bishop) thanks for not burning these treaures before you passed away!

You always made us stand up and Listen...

Now you’ll always have us sit back... and Laugh.

For here you succeed at PUTTING US AT EASE.

And what a GREAT way to remember you two guys!

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh it is best to be both,
Both sides of the same coin,
Half man and half horse,
Poor creatures of rhyme,
Who want to rejoin
The human race
And life and time.

Likely the best book I will read this year. Now there's a depressing thought! The possible downturn from here isn't actually or entirely discouraging. I still feel enriched by the experience. These two generous souls had a lifetime of friendship. The constant struggle to arrange a meeting, the possibility of a conversation. As Bishop noted, " I suffer from lack of company--but better none at all than bores." Then the footnotes reveal all that was left unsaid: the madness, the destructive drinking, the tortured souls--both of which felt they weren't desirable. Bishop edits the verse of Lowell often word by word. Lowell helps steer awards and positions Bishop's way. They travel. They attempt to establish roots. Life intervenes. There's a messy grace to it all. I assume there is for most of us.

[Buck · Rating 2 out of 5]

You’ve probably come across this harmless little hyperbole in Sunday book reviews – you know, the one that goes something like, ‘Joe Blow is such a brilliant writer that I could cheerfully read his grocery lists.' Well, I’ve now read the grocery lists -- figuratively-speaking -- of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, and let me tell you, I’m none too cheerful about it.

The one inescapable problem with a ‘complete correspondence’ such as Words in Air is that it’s so damn…complete. It’s all here: every scribbled postcard, every casual note, every trip to the store or loony bin (more of the latter than the former with these two, sadly). Yes, both writers can be witty and eloquent when the mood strikes but, for the most part, they sound like what they were: a couple of close friends just shooting the shit. So they chat about their work, their health, mutual acquaintances – all the stuff that we ordinary, non-Pulitzer-prize-winning lugs talk about in our garrulous, emoticon-riddled emails. And that’s great – it really humanizes them, and you come away with the sense that Lowell and Bishop were basically modest, unpretentious souls huddled in the wreckage of elaborately fucked-up lives.

But for the love of God, a little discrimination, please, people! I don’t need 800 pages of weather reports and advice on grant applications. The only conceivable audience for this hulking monster of a book are the three scholars (I’m estimating) currently working on tell-all biographies of the poets. Anyone with a merely borderline-obsessive interest in Bishop or Lowell is advised to stick with the selected letters (which I haven’t read myself, but I understand they’ve been put together by nice, judicious editors who show some passing regard for the reader’s convenience and sanity). Or better yet, read the poetry. After all, that’s what counts, isn’t it? The grocery lists will recede into the historical record, along with (one hopes) the mental breakdowns, alcoholism and ugly divorces. Let it go.

During one of my increasingly lengthy breaks from Words in Air, I picked up Bishop’s collected poems and dipped in at random, hitting on a piece called “The Roosters”. In the space of five minutes, it pretty much blew my mind and got me more excited than anything in the first 150 pages of the other book. That’s when I knew it was time to drop the correspondence and drop it fast, like a bad date - with a pang of guilt, perhaps, but without regret.



============================

More and more I've come to think that the type of relationship enjoyed by these two writers represents an ideal dynamic in male-female interactions. The secret, unfortunately, seems to be: emotional closeness and physical distance. Unworkable, you say? But is it any more unworkable than the various alternatives? Those of you who've figured out a better arrangement can post your solutions below.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I paused at page 140. I was enjoying this very much but am setting it aside because it’s an enormous book that I’ve had out from the university library for months and months, and I was making very little visible progress. Like Airmail, the collection of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer’s letters that I read last year, it’s a delightful mixture of the two poets’ reading, writing, travels, and relationships, including their own burgeoning friendship. I need to get hold of a secondhand copy so I can read it at my leisure, a few letters at a time.

[Lisa McKenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The cover photo says it all; these are two people who loved each other dearly...at an arm's length. This ideal platonic love was sustained through decades of passionate correspondence. The loves of their daily lives were not as enduring. Two of Lowell's marriages ended with divorce; two of Bishop's love affairs ended with suicide.
Lowell's joy at seeing Bishop in person tended to explode into mania, so perhaps it was best he didn't get to see her all that often. Lowell reflected on "how ideally we've really kept things, better than life allows really," yet bemoaned the price of separation, "I wish every now and then and quite often, we two could have more days on the beach, talking unhurriedly and watching the surf break."
One of the perks of this book is the negative space; the reader learns all the minute details of their separations, yet precious little about their actual time together. Reading between the lines is a guilty pleasure— "Yesterday was nice—I hope you weren't too exhausted." Yet reading the lines themselves is a pure pleasure. Bishop wrote, "Please never stop writing me letters—they always manage to make me feel like my higher self."

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spent two and a half years reading Words In Air – reading fifty- or hundred-page chunks between other books – and I think it is the best thing I have read in a very long time. I knew nothing about Elizabeth Bishop or Robert Lowell when I entered their thirty year correspondence (I just like books of letters) and I got to know them, their brilliant poems, their debilitating faults, and the lives of poets (or some poets) from the 1940’s to the 1970’s. I spent more time than I ever expected trying to understand a defense of Ezra Pound, I researched their favorite books (including Bishop’s favorite 19th Century animal fiction, Rolf in the Woods), I listened to the classical pieces they referenced (or dwelt on), I found the Google Street View of their past residences. I didn’t become obsessed but – when I was in the book – I felt somehow enmeshed in those two lives. Books of letters leave things out: while reading the very last letter of Words In Air I discovered a rather important bit of gossip about Bishop and American literature that either was glossed over or I missed a few hundred pages earlier. So when some time passes, maybe a few years, I’m going to reopen the book and start again, picking up the pieces I missed and reliving these two lives.

Two excerpts from Lowell letters that I copied down while reading:

“Maine is restful for our jaded Boston nerves. Except for driving up it’s been pure rest cure—one much needed. Oh the drive up! We had to have a trailer. Due to some uncharacteristic oversight in my planning, I found myself faced with fearful alternatives. There are two kinds of U-haul-it trailer, the open, and the covered, little ambulance-like wagons that blot out all back-view and are entirely dangerous. The covered may be returned to the nearest large city (Belfast, 25 miles from Castine), the cozy uncovered ones must be brought back to Boston, an additional drive of 458 miles. I hadn’t understood, hadn’t securely bound the agent to the terms I had imagined. I took the uncovered trailer. For two hundred of the two hundred and twenty-nine miles, we analyzed the flaws in this choice. […] At Wiscasset, still gloomy with the boredom you felt there many summers go, I got out—I was beginning to nod at the wheel—and went swimming off the dock. While I was in the water, a freight-train slowly came to a stop and cut me off from my car and family. Getting out, I cut my big toe on the step, a barnacled tire. Oh, when we got to Castine we found a young resident poet, off to the wedding of his favorite Wellesley student, and he drove the trailer back.” (1957)

“Did I write you about having a haircut at the Ritz in Boston? When I got there there were a couple of boys ahead of me, one had about a quarter of an inch of hair left from his crew haircut and yet was waiting for that to be trimmed down. The other, I felt with relief, was at least normally in need of a haircut. Then I saw this other kept twitching and grimacing, and that his mother was begging him to calm himself and finally that his eyes were rolled so that only the whites showed. I started to read in Life, an article on megalitonic warfare, the 96 per cents that we and Russia could destroy of each other, the planes with bombs 24 hours in the air, any one able to get jittery or answer a false warning and let go. When I was in the chair, the barber was brownish, baldish, spectacled man, looking rather like William Carlos Williams. He was talking about fishing for flounder in Boston harbor. It was always spoiled one or two drunks. “The world’s fine except for the people in it,” he said.” (1961)

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

These letters are amazing, but there are so many of them, and they are do chock full of lush sentences, insights into the work of these poets, and lots of poetry gossip, that I had to read them in small bites. Lovely.

[Kayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

I fell into this book for several weeks and I'm having a difficult time returning to my time period. Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell were dear friends and wrote prolifically to one another for thirty years. They talked about their poetry, their loves and struggles, and other poets loves and struggles. Bishop deconstructed Lowell's poetry with an eye for detail and authenticity. Lowell provided her unwavering support when she was most in need of it. Although one feels like one is peeking into private, sacred ground, the depth of it outweighs the guilt. I'm going to go visit her grave in Worcester. That's where a truly good book will lead you;)

[Lynn Kearney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful letters. Didn't know much about either poet, but their correspondence gives real flavour of their times. One LOL reference from EB who was, I think teaching Freshman English. Students were writing essays on Romeo and Juliet. From one: "Lady Capulet is older than Juliet but she remains a woman". And another refers to Romeo making his way "into the tomb of the Catapults". Puts me in mind of a a goldie from my teaching days. The play - Julius Caesar, where "this old guy shouts 'Hey Caesar, beware! Beware the March of Dimes'"

[RH Walters · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started this book because I lost my beloved penpal and wanted to read someone else's letters, then I got a letter from Bill in Palo Alto, and Maggie in Eden Prairie and Bailey in Washington and felt I could go on again. I liked it when Elizabeth compared the disheveled harbor outside her window to her desk. A hideous offhand comment from Robert about Elizabeth's allergies and a "negress named Florence." Interesting to read their comments about Eliot's "protestant seriousness" in Middlemarch, which I read not so long ago. I'll return to it again when I'm lonely for a letter.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have never read correspondence before (except in epistolary novels) so I was pleasantly surprised by how readable it was. These letters cover a 30 year span which allows the reader to really get to know Bishop and Lowell. I would recommend either reading their poetry first or having it handy to refer to as (not surprisingly) there are a lot of references to specific poems (even to specific lines or words in the poems).

[Richard Jespers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading the published letters exchanged between two important figures in twentieth-century American literature, among many things, has allowed me the proper venue for being a voyeur! The details Lowell and Bishop reveal about themselves, their families, and friends is astounding. The entire enterprise took me the better part of seven months, not because I was a particularly slow reader or because I found the reading boring but because each time I opened the book I was only able to take in ten or twenty pages before becoming saturated. By reading nearly every footnote and making a note on every book or poem or piece of music or work of art that these two fine artists recommended or alluded to, I was slowed to the pace of enjoying a box of chocolates, a bit at a time.

Elizabeth Bishop herself cites composer Virgil Thompson: “‘one of the strange things about poets is the way they keep warm by writing to one another all over the world’” (494). Indeed, these two keep each other warm for thirty years, from 1947, when both are beginning to experience success, to 1977, when Robert Lowell dies of a heart attack in a “taxi from Kennedy Airport on his return to New York on September 12” (xli). Bishop dies on September 21 “in the early evening of a cerebral aneurysm” (xli). No one, absolutely no one, writes letters like these any longer, not even members of the literati. Or if they do, they are not saving them in boxes. As soon as a party dies, unless he or she has made copies of their emails there shall remain no record. And do those electronic memoranda even count as letters?

I would love to share the thousands of bits of information that Lowell and Bishop leave us by way of their letters, but I shall confine my nuggets to several categories of information: Literary Criticism, Keen Observations, the Personal, and Gossip.

Nuggets:

EB: “There’s a little Catholic girl named Flannery O’Connor here now [Yaddo], who will remain if she can—a real writer, I think one of the best to be when she is a little older. Very moral (in your sense) and witty—whom I’m sure you’d like” (79).

EB: “Good lord—there’s a fifteen year old girl next door whose voice & general personality is just about as restful as a stuck automobile horn” (85).

EB: “Marianne [Moore] is wonderful, that’s all. If I don’t mention my health she writes implying that she knows I’m concealing my dying throes from her. If I say I’ve never felt better in my life (God’s truth) she writes ‘Brave Elizabeth!’ (Lota [EB’s longtime companion] says it’s a form of aggression). She used to send one rather stolid, timid friend of ours on Errands of Mercy, to people he’d never met. She told him that ‘poor Peter Monro Jack’ was in desperate straits, sick, lonely, heaven knows what all, and the friend went to call, probably taking a bag of groceries or a bunch of flowers, and found a large gay party going on, with everyone in evening dress” (189).

EB: “Ll showed me a long verse-letter, very obscene, he’d received from Dylan T[homas] before D’s last trip here [New York]—very clever, but it really can’t be published for a long, long time, he’s decided. About people D. met in the U.S. etc.—one small sample: A Streetcar Named Desire is referred to as “A truck called F———“ (215).

RL: “Psycho-therapy is rather amazing—something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium—chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct” (92).

RL: “I have just finished the Yeats Letters—900 & something pages—although some I’d read before. He is so Olympian always, so calm, so really unrevealing, and yet I was fascinated” (160).

RL: “Probably you forget, and anyway all that is mercifully changed and all has come right since you found Lota. But at the time everything, I guess (I don’t want to overdramatize) our relations seemed to have reached a new place. I assumed that would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept. Yet I wanted it all to have the right build-up. Well, I didn’t say anything then” (225).

EB: “so I suppose I am just a born worrier, and that when the personal worries of adolescence and the years after it have more or less disappeared I promptly have to start worrying about the decline of nations . . . But I really can’t bear much of American life these days—surely no country has ever been so filthy rich and so hideously uncomfortable at the same time” (229). 8/28/57

EB: “We actually did go through the Doldrums—a day of them. The water absolutely slick and flat and the flying fish making sprays of long scratches across it, exactly like finger-nail scratches. Aruba is a little hell-like island, very strange. It rarely if ever rains there, and there’s nothing but cactus hedges and prickly trees and goats and one broken-off miniature dead volcano. It’s set in miles of oil slicks and oil rainbows and black gouts of oil suspended in the water, crude oil—and Onassis’ tankers on all sides, flying the flags of Switzerland, Panama, and Liberia” (245).

RL: “The man next to me is [in McLean’s, a mental health facility] a Harvard Law professor. One day, he is all happiness, giving the plots of Trollope novels, distinguishing delicately between the philosophies of Holmes and Brandeis, reminiscing wittily about Frankfurter. But on another day, his depression blankets him” (252).

RL: “You must read the [Boris] Pasternak Dr. Zhivago, badly translated but dwarfing all other post-war novels except Mann. Everyone says it’s great but too lyrical to be a novel. I feel shaken and haunted by the main character” (267). “bigger perhaps than anything by Turgenev and something that alters both the old Russia and the new for us—alters our own world too.” (271).

EB: “When your letter came I was reading Dr. Jivago (Zhivago, in English)—in French. I stopped part way through because the book’s owner wanted it back, and I think I’ll finish it in English. I agree with you completely, I even liked the poems at the end, as much as one could tell about them” (274).

RL: “Fred Dupee, and James Baldwin (the colored writer) [sic] and I talked at Brandeis last week. We were each paid $200 and had limp little audiences of about thirty wriggling students. I like Baldwin’s Negro [sic] essays very much—no blarney like [Richard] Wright’s when he isn’t giving a real scene and has to generalize. I am now trying to obliterate my abolitionist pangs before seeing [Jarrell] Randall” (291).

RL: “The other night [Allen] Ginsberg, [Gregory] Corso, and [Peter] Orlovsky came to call on me. As you know, our house, as Lizzie [Hardwick] says, is nothing if not pretentious. Planned to stun people. When they came in, they all took off their wet shoes and tiptoed upstairs. They are phony in a way because they have made a lot of publicity out of very little talent. But in another way, they are pathetic and doomed . . . there was an awful lot of subdued talk about their being friends and lovers, and once Ginsberg and Orlovsky disappeared in unison to the john and reappeared on each other’s shoulders . . . I think they’ll die of TB” (297-8).

EB: “Also Ned Rorem wrote me he’d seen you in Buffalo. He’s quite a good song writer, I believe (& he thinks so, too)” (307). Meow!

EB: “That Anne Sexton I think still has a bit too much romanticism and what I think of as the “our beautiful old silver” school of female writing which is really boasting about how ‘nice’ we were. V[irginia] Woolf, K[atherine] Anne Porter, [Elizabeth] Bowen, R[ebecca] West, etc.—they are all full of it. They have to make quite sure that the reader is not going to mis-place them socially, first—and that nervousness interferes constantly with what they think they’d like to say . . . I wrote a story at Vassar that was too much admired by Miss Rose Peebles, my teacher, who was very proud of being an old-school Southern lady, and suddenly this fact about women’s writing dawned on me, and has haunted me ever since” (333).

RL: “there’s just a queer, half-apocalyptic, nuclear feeling in the air, as tho nations had died and were now anachronistic, yet in their anarchic death-throes would live on for ages troubling us, threatening the likelihood of life continuing” (381).

RL: “I was rather on tiptoe that my poems had been intrusive, and read you letter with great relief. Your suggestions on ‘Water’ might be great improvements. By the way, the mermaid wasn’t your Millay parody, but something in one of your letters, inspired by Wiscasset probably. Glad this and my tampering with ‘In the Village’ didn’t annoy you. When ‘The Scream’ is published I’ll explain, it’s just a footnote to your marvelous story” (405).

EB: “Your piece on Frost is awfully nice, Cal [RL’s nickname]. And ‘Buenos Aires’ is certainly The Latin City—I’ll have to go there, I see why you liked it so much. I like the first stanzas best. But I DON’T like the phallic monument, Cal. This has nothing to do with the preceding paragraph—it is just that I think it is unoriginal. It seems to me I’ve read so many ‘Phallic monuments’ in poetry—Spend used to use it ad nauseam, for one. Oh I know it’s the Idea, and Peron, and Power, etc.—it couldn’t be more appropriate. But I feel that you can surprise us better than that.— I hope you won’t mind my saying this— The first part has so many enlightening images, then I found ‘phallus’ too expected” (448).

RL: “The Stone Phallus was meant to be awfully raw and obvious, but maybe the poem ought to end earlier” (455).

RL: “What you say about the ‘Union dead’ poem is subtly true, must be a huge hunk of health that has survived and somehow increased through all these breakdown[s], eight or nine, I think, in about fifteen years. Pray god there’ll be no more” (559).

EB: “I seem to get to places at just the wrong time—before that I spent four days at the University of Oklahoma. That was really fun; I had a wonderful time—but the desolation of that scenery, at that time of year, is incredible.— I’ve seen ‘lonely New England farmhouses’—but nothing can compare to a lonely, small-sized, ranch-house in Oklahoma. One can see for miles—all pale tan—only the pumping oil-wells lend animation to the scene—even the ‘Wild Life Reservation’—pumping away like lost lunatics—” (741).

RL: “I see us still when we first met, both at Randall’s and then for a couple of years later. I see you as rather tall, long brown-haired, shy but full of des[cription] and anecdote as now. I was brown haired and thirty I guess and I don’t know what. I was largely invisible to myself, and nothing I knew how to look at. But the fact is we were swimming in our young age, with the water coming down on us, and we were gulping. I can’t go on. It is better now only there’s a steel cord stretch[ed] tense at about arms-length above us, and what we look forward to must be accompanied by our less grace and strength. Well, no more dies irae; I wonder if Christians believing in immortality saw their lives as less circular” (776).

EB: “However, Cal dear, maybe your memory is failing!— Never, never was I ‘tall’—as you wrote remembering me. I was always 5 ft 4 and ¼ inches—now shrunk to 5 ft 4 inches— The only time I’ve ever felt all was in Brazil. And I never had ‘long brown hair’ either!” (778).

RL: “I still thrill to your visit. After a little, it seemed as if almost thirty years had rolled back, and we were talking, brownhaired, callow and new in New York, Washington or Maine. Voice and image seemed much more what we were than what we are—or is the essence as it was?” (793).

[Lauren Acquaviva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I think you could describe Bishop and Lowell as being "in love," in the soulmates/kindred spirits sense of the expression, it was not an affair in the conventional sense. I’d rather use “loving” as my adjective for these letters, no matter what Maria Popova has to say about it - - a loving friendship, but also a loving reader & critic relationship.

This volume is long, and their writings to one another are filled with quotidian life details that some may find less interesting. Thankfully it is also overflowing with intellectual engagement between two brilliant writers: when they get to discussing poetry itself, the back-and-forth between them lights up, and it becomes a testament of record to the inner workings of a time of immense change in how poetry was both written and read.

The best letters of this collection show each of them responding to one another's draft poems with wit, admiration, and honesty. The correspondence is particularly valuable for the sense of each of their craftsmanship conveyed, revealing their working processes as they tinkered with and commented on one another’s poetry. It also gives voice to the chronic professional crises in confidence they were both susceptible to, which I found relatable and insightful...and as much as they loved each other, there is no shortage of chiding, lecturing, and debate between them.

If you aren’t necessarily familiar with either of their work, the relationship might be a bit obscure at times, but the obvious affection and admiration between them bridges the ‘shop talk’ sections beautifully. Moreover, as with any epistolary collection it’s engaging to witness world events through their eyes as communicated to one another.

It was especially fascinating to track their professional output alongside their letters - - several poems are clearly written in response to one another as a sort of public conversation, and these are made more meaningful by reading the thoughts and feelings that surrounded them in their private relationship.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Massive, but full of lacunae by definition, probably essential for those interested in these two probably essential mid-century poets.

[b bb bbbb bbbbbbbb · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's sad when the end of a book means coming to the end of the real lives in it. Especially after having settled into the correspondence between two people and getting to feel like you know them just a little. You don't exactly want to finish, but it's too good to stop so you keep going.

The letters were great slow reading material. They know what to include and how much, the material is rarely boring. A mix of life, art, observations and a little gossip. It's like overhearing a good conversation that goes on as long as you'd like, and which can be paused and returned to later at will. Liking their poetry, or any poetry in general, is not a requirement for enjoying the letters since it's rarely present except as a subject matter of work or appreciation.

It took a couple months to finish and I wouldn't have it any other way. A couple letters at a time each morning to go with breakfast, 5-15 pages a day. Just the right amount to enjoy without it being overdone. It was like receiving a couple well crafted, interesting letters each day (only, less personal to me, yet very personal between Bishop and Lowell). They won't be for everyone, and especially not those wanting to read at a page-turner pace or who want material material which has been pruned down to just the juicy parts.

An odd thing about letters is that during times when the correspondents are near each other, spending more time together in person, they grow more distant from the reader due to the gaps created in the correspondence. It leaves you happy they were able to see one another, yet missing their commentary and wondering happened. At the same time, the amount which went unsaid and unmentioned in the letters becomes clear when reading about their lives from other sources (the footnotes reveal a small amount of this).

Some minor notes :
* I hadn't realized Bishop was the one who translated the Diary of Helena Morley to English in the 1950's.

* They sure don't like the Beat artists. Considering the Beats have taken such a firm and iconic place in this countries cultural history it makes me wonder what contributed to that. Could there be an element of generational or background/class difference? (Though, I'm not particularly taken with the Beat material I've seen either)

A couple quotes :
* "I guess I don't really like solitude. The fun is hammering bits of it out of a crowded life."

* "I feel we are now what the young invariably look on as alien, but somehow real. That's how I used to look on people our age."

* "But the fact is we were swimming in our young age, with the water coming down on us, and we were gulping."

* "Maybe the best thing is to have someone forceful handle it for you, but even lambs like us can kick the bucket over."

One more (a long one), on Flannery O'Conner :
* "I gather she must have died of the bone disease, Lupus, that plagued her all these years. A book of short stories will come out in January. It seems such a short time ago that I met her at Yaddo, 23 or 24, always in a blue jean suit, working on the last chapters of Wise Blood, suffering from the undiagnosed pains, a face formless at times, then very strong and young and right. She had already really mastered and found her themes and style, knew she wouldn't marry, would be Southern, shocking and disciplined. In a blunt, disdainful yet somehow very unpretentious and modest way, I think she knew how good she was. I suppose she knew dimly about the future, the pain, the brevity, the peacocks, the life with her mother. She was 38 when she died, and I think always had the character of a commanding, grim, witty child, who knew she was destined to live painfully and in earnest, a hero, rather like a nun or Catholic saint with a tough innocence, well able to take on her brief, hardworking, hard, steady, splendid and inconspicuous life. I think the cards seemed heavily stacked against her, and her fates must have felt that they had so thoroughly hemmed her in that they could forget, and all would [have] happened as planned, but really she did what she had decided on and was less passive and dependent than anyone I can think of."

[Diann Blakely]

Among the annual lists of "best poetry books of the year," there's one title that may be missing, though it was written by two of the defining poets of the 20th century. WORDS IN AIR: THE COMPLETE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN ELIZABETH BISHOP AND ROBERT LOWELL, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton, contains the barest snippets of verse, and there's as much commentary on the dailiness of their own lives as on their work (including Bishop's "The Armadillo" and Lowell's "Skunk Hour," probably each poet's most-anthologized work). But on any such list, WORDS IN AIR inarguably belongs.

Lowell gave Bishop a belief in the narrative importance of her own life. She gave him a belief in the importance of simplicity at a time when he was struggling to throw off the muscle-bound, Miltonian style of his first book, LORD WEARY'S CASTLE. She also gave him a much-needed jauntiness that comes from a life-long familiarity—in their case, 30 years—of marrow-deep acquaintance in the art.

"I believe," Bishop wrote Lowell, "in swimming, flying, and crawling, and burrowing." Lowell, too, believed in burrowing: Even apart from the time he spent in asylum beds—where he went almost yearly for attacks of mania—he preferred to write in day beds piled high with notebooks, volumes of history and poetry, and discarded socks. "Fun, it always seemed to leave you at a loss," Bishop wrote in "North Haven" after his death.

Lowell, it is true, ceaselessly rewrote his poems, even recasting "The Water," originally in free verse, as a sonnet titled "Water, 1948," in which he regretted his decision not to marry Bishop, despite her bisexuality: "[A]sking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had." Bishop, who also struggled with alcoholism, replied with characteristic New England practicality: "Get a good shrink and don't drink."

Lowell's ventures into anything that might be called "light-hearted" took the form of mania and serial infidelity. Bishop herself remained a serial monogamist, and perhaps her greatest poem, "One Art," written in fear that her late-life companion and literary executor, Alice Methfessel, might leave her after an extended binge, counts as the century's best villanelle, at the very least after Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night."

Even readers who devoured ONE ART, Bishop's voluminous edition of letters (1994), and Lowell's own collection, painstakingly put together by Saskia Hamilton (1995), must not omit this volume, which adds more than 300 pages of new epistles. As Bishop's elegy "North Haven" ends, "You can't derange, or re-arrange, / your poems again." Nor can these letters be changed. They are a monument to one of the great literary friendships of all time, and a testimony to how two colleagues can serve not only each other but also the art they share.


originally published by the NASHVILLE SCENE / Village Voice Media

[Lynne-marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

That two writers could have an entirely epistolary relationship -- though they DID meet occasionally from time to time briefly -- and yet reveal their most important thoughts to one another is an artifact from another age. Who will save the e-mails of today? It is certainly significant that at several points, Bisop & Lowell considered marrying, but both knew it would have been a disaster for them. But as help-meets in their most important phase of life: their writing, they were withough peer for each other. This is an important book in understanding either of them, but more, I think, Bishop, who being the more parsimonious, left us less of herself in other ways. Even her poetry is a matter of taking away until what is left pleases her eye, ear and mind. In these gossipy letters, she is less careful, more accessible.

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a huge book, and I confess to random browsing -- and now it's overdue at the library. I am fascinated by letters between writers, the documentation of the evolution of friendship. The early letters are tentative -- they are not even sure how to address each other. Then later there is the evident admiration and respect for each other as poets, and the development of intimacy as friends. They share work, critiquing each others' and their own, and come to understand and love each other. The frustrating part is the sort of "shorthand" they use to refer to people and events and the obvious fact that the reader remains and outsider, merely an observer of the relationship, even as the writers become more fully revealed as more than "just" poets.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like this book! It is all the correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell over their lifetimes. They shared poetry and reviewed poetry of other poets of the time. It's a snapshot of literature history. It's romantic that they had a longstanding relationship, deep and true but were never lovers. Sometimes I read the pining in between the lines of their letters or their poetry. My favorite poem is by Lowell for Bishop, just a bit of it below
Have you seen an inchworm crawl on a leaf, cling to the very end, revolve in air,
feeling for something to reach to something? Do
you still hang your words in air, ten years
unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps
or empties for the unimaginable phrase--
unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect?

[Abby · Rating 4 out of 5]

It feels very strange to be rating the complete letters of two famous American poets. But they were great letters: so frank and funny and sincere. This collection of the complete correspondence between poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell is for the serious fans only; I can't imagine anyone with even a passing interest slogging through all 928 pages of their letters. Someone else's letters are, after all, only interesting up to a certain point, even if the someones in question are Bishop and Lowell. But they entertain and amuse. They had such a delightfully intimate and rare friendship. I felt honored to be able to peek into their lives in this way.

[Emily Flynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love writing letters and this is a book of letters between two of the most established and prolific poets of the 20th century. Two quirky and brilliant people form a very unusual friendship based mostly on written correspondence which spans three decades and several continents, making one hell of an unusual read. Some of the dated slang is almost worth it in and of itself, but overall this is just a fascinating and touching read. It's great this rainy time of year with some tea and a house sweater.

[Eden · Rating 3 out of 5]

I took my time with this book, started in in January '09 and read a few letters each weekend, and just finished it in September '09. I enjoyed the fiercely loyal friendship between Bishop and Lowell (even while Lowell seemed to be a rotten and disloyal husband); their give-and-take discussion of the creative process; and, as with most books of letters, the silent mysteries alluded to that are never really explained (Bishop would go on alcoholic benders, Lowell would spend months on end at a sanitarium). I'm excited to read more about Bishop's life, to fill in the gaps (One Art is up next).

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is not only an exchange between two great minds but a history of the high point of twentieth century art, before junk took over. They talk of meter, rhyme, form , and gossip about fellow writers: Jarrell etc. Mutual love too. It makes one think of better days. You experience their first discovery of DeSica, anti war protests, civil rights, modern concert music including Webern, Thelonious Monk and more (and Moore)

[Sam Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had forgotten this until I came across a note to myself - "quote EB [Elizabeth Bishop:] on Natty Bumppo." Well, I can't now find the quote, but this is a marvelous narrative of the on-again, off-again relationship between our two greatest anti-Communist poets who were, essentially, romantically in love with one another without being sexually attracted. It's pure bliss - and if you read it please tell me what EB DID say about Natty Bumppo.

[Melanie Faith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm only about 50 pages in, and already I'm hooked on the letters between these two marvelous poets. For anyone interested in either Bishop and Lowell (or both poets') poems OR for fans of literary correspondence, you can't do much better than this compendium of over thirty years of notes and discussions of travels, life, love, love-gone-away, and the writing life. The introduction is also fascinatingly in-depth and well worth at least a perusal.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I purchased this book, my dad's comment was that Lowell and Bishop were "slutty alcoholics." But even though she's gay and he's a man-whore, these two are in lurrrrrrv. It is basically the sweetest thing you have ever seen.


UPDATE: As of today, I have literally been reading this book for an entire year. But man, I am still so fond of these snobby ass-hats.

UPDATE: IN CASE ANYONE WAS WONDERING, I TOTALLY FINISHED READING THIS BOOK. All 800 billion pages of it.

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only 4 stars because I thought the editing could have been better (I am using the Virginia Woolf letters & diaries as my standard). I read quite a lot of Lowell and Bishop in high school, though by the time I got to college I was academically interested in other things, so I never studied them formally. But it was wonderful to meet them again as humans rather that abstracts. Must read some bios and other collections of correspondence.

[Karin Cope · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having a wonderful time reading this book....helps make me feel better about my own daily struggles as a writer, to look over the shoulders of these two titans of American poetry. Makes me more attentive to the value of letters, too. And of relationships with other writers & artists--how essential they are!

[Juliana Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me all summer to read this book, but I enjoyed every minute I spent with these letters. I've long been a fan of Bishop and Lowell's poetry, but reading their letters gave me a much better sense of them as people, and as friends. Bishop's style is so (seemingly) breezy and chatty, and Lowell works so hard to impress her-- it's adorable. And intimate, and heartbreaking.

[Laurel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apart from the literary-history aspect, which I am obviously into, it's a great model for a sustained intimate epistolary relationship between two friends who were geographically distant, committed to other partners, sometimes wry, sometimes silly, sometimes in despair, wrestling with their own problems and society's.