Status Updates From Words in Air: The Complete ...

Expect to read this in fits and starts over the whole year

The correspondence reads like a novel , a story of a relationship, both deeply personal and professional, between the two remarkable modern poets and intellectuals. It covers 30 years of their lives as intimate friends, fellow poets, literary reviewers, academic lecturers, travellers and cross-cultural explorers. Juicy bits of gossip of the rich literary scene between 50s-70s is quite enjoyable.

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taking me so long to finish this thing is huge but loveeee these two<3all the literary scene goss & marianne moore is their MOTHER

Lowell wrote the following upon the death of Roethke, poor guy, he had a bruised life, but he didn’t dry up—somehow quite clean and phosphorescent in his wallow.

Are we couth or uncouth?
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.

Easily my favorite book of those I’m presently reading.

I wouldn’t be that mature, if I lived to ninety, and memorized Montaigne and had hallucinations that I was Santayana. —Lowell

The Revolution has come, I guess, yet we’re still creatures of flesh and blood.

Awful moment when you realize you must read twenty more pages to a slowly vanishing wall of disapproving old ladies.

I truly need this presently.