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

Writers write.

Who knew, when Robert Lowell died, that he would be nearly eclipsed by the work of his good friend Elizabeth Bishop? Those few thin pages in the Library of America edition of her work that constitute her published work testify to its distilled power.

We get a glimmering of that potential upheaval in reputation here in the collected letters that they wrote to each other. Bishop's are longer, generally, and more personal. They show her living a quiet life, coping with the creation of those exquisite poems, and struggling to make a living and be the public person that she knows she needs to be to be able to go on doing her work.

One has the impression that it was the lionization and the rôle of "great poet" that undid Lowell as poet, but his illness was what undid his life. There are huge lacunae in his letters during these bouts. Robert Lowell shows his fragility and his ego in the letters; ultimately, what comes through is the poignancy of his good-natured earnestness.

Lowell's letters seem a bit light in comparison to Bishop's, but that is part of what makes these exchanges interesting--the exposure of the two different personalities. There are few great truths about their poetry, but a great deal of worthwhile reading about the life of the "successful" poet, which turns mostly, unsurprisingly, on money worries.

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