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

INTRODUCTION

"WHAT A BLOCK OF LIFE"

In July 1965 the great mid-century American poet Robert Lowell (1917–1977), who had recently weathered a controversy that brought him into widely publicized opposition to the nation's president, wrote affectionately to his poetic peer and close friend Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) from his summer retreat in Castine, Maine, "How wonderful you are Dear, and how wonderful that you write me letters . . . In this mid-summer moment I feel at peace, and that we both have more or less lived up to our so different natures and destinies. What a block of life has passed since we first met in New York and Washington!" Two years earlier, when their correspondence was briefly interrupted, Lowell acknowledged that "I think of you daily and feel anxious lest we lose our old backward and forward flow that always seems to open me up and bring color and peace." Lowell told Bishop in 1970 that "you [have] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend," and the feeling was surely mutual. For her part Bishop, with her characteristic blend of directness and wry humor, urged Lowell, "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 . . ."

Through wars, revolutions, breakdowns, brief quarrels, failed marriages and love affairs, and intense poetry-writing jags, the letters kept coming. For these were not merely intimate friends, ready to share each other's lives with all their piquant and painful and funny moments, but eager readers-eager for the next letter, eager for the next poem. For each, personally as well as artistically, these letters became a part of their abidance: a part of that huge block of life they had lived together and apart over thirty years of witty and intimately confiding correspondence.

Bishop and Lowell began their lifelong exchange of letters after meeting at a New York dinner party hosted by Randall Jarrell in January 1947. When Jarrell, a gifted poet and the most discerning poetry critic of his age, introduced his old friend Robert Lowell to his new friend Elizabeth Bishop, he was bringing together the two American poets of his generation whom he most admired. The painfully shy Bishop, so often anxious and tongue-tied when among the literati, immediately felt at home with this most imposing of literary lions. Once the letters started coming, any hint of initial stiffness quickly gave way to that easy "backward and forward flow." The exchange continued for the next three decades, ending only with Lowell's death in 1977. Bishop's own death followed two years later, but not before she had written "North Haven," the most touching and incisive elegy Lowell ever received: "Fun," Bishop wrote of her "sad friend," "it always seemed to leave you at a loss . . ." Yet although both Lowell and Bishop lived lives of some disorder colored by early sorrow, each was clearly having fun with letters as frequently amusing-and often downright hilarious-as these. Indeed, the droll give-and-take of their affectionate serve and volley is perhaps the letters' most surprising and engaging feature. This complete collection of the letters between them extends by more than three hundred letters the published canon of their mutual exchange to be found separately in their selected correspondence: Bishop's One Art: Letters (1994), edited by Robert Giroux, and The Letters of Robert Lowell (2005), edited by Saskia Hamilton. The back-and-forth interchange recorded in the present volume provides a window of discovery into the human and artistic development of two brilliant poets over their last and most productive three decades.

Although Bishop confessed to Lowell in a 1975 letter that she had "been almost too scared to go" to that fateful 1947 meeting, in Lowell she discovered an artistic counterpart whose individuality, verbal flair, and dedication to craft mirrored her own. And the letters themselves are unique. For the artistic distinction of the correspondents, for the unfolding intimacy of the int...