Elizabeth Bishop wrote that to Robert Lowell, after reading one of his poems. An amazing symbiotic relationship – the two influencing one another, loving one another – while living separate lives. I am most interested in how the work affected each other. Lowell was much more famous in his own day than Elizabeth Bishop was – although now I am SO pleased to see that she is having a bit of a renaissance, she is one of my favorite poets.
Bishop and Lowell kept up a correspondence for the 30 years of their friendship, and while some have already been published already, now a volume has come out with their entire correspondence – Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
They never married. Lowell had many lovers, and a wife, Bishop stayed with one woman for many many years (sadly, this woman committed suicide – yet another plot-point in the tragic story that was Bishop’s outer life). But theirs was a soulmate kind of connection. Lowell did ask her to marry him, and her cooler head prevailed. It seems, though, that they were each other’s “perfect reader”. Every writer needs one. Not a critic, not a gushing fan … but someone who is able to really hear not just the words, but the intent. Who can speak to the theme, the greater picture. I recently read one of my pieces out loud to Rachel and Mitchell – it was one I had been struggling with. As we settled in for my reading, Rachel said, “What do you want us to be listening for?” Now THAT is a good reader. It helped me to focus my own intentions and goals – and it helped me to think about the piece in a larger way, so that I could work on that LARGER element, not just the language or the progression of events.
Bishop and Lowell were two very different poets – it is hard to imagine their rapport. She was solitary, with a tiny literate following. She wrote about fish houses and the beach and small moments. He upended his psychology, pouring passion and unrequited feeling into his poems. They worked FOR one another, over decades.
It was a highly passionate relationship, and you ache reading some of their letters.
William Logan writes, in the NY Times piece:
Their admiration even made them light fingered â they borrowed ideas or images the way a neighbor might steal a cup of sugar. Lowell was especially tempted by this lure of the forbidden, using one of Bishopâs dreams in a heartbreaking poem about their might-have-been affair, or rewriting in verse one of her short stories. They were literary friends in all the usual ways, providing practical advice (the forever dithery and procrastinating Bishop proved surprisingly pragmatic), trading blurbs, logrolling as shamelessly as pork-bellied senators (Lowell was adept at dropping the quiet word on her behalf). There was a refined lack of jealousy between them â that particular vice never found purchase, though in letters to friends they could afford the occasional peevish remark about each other. The only time Bishop took exception to Lowellâs poems was when, in âThe Dolphinâ (1973), he incorporated angry letters from his ex-wife Elizabeth Hardwick â âArt just isnât worth that much,â Bishop exclaimed. She flinched when poets revealed in their poems too much of themselves, once claiming that she wished she âcould start writing poetry all over again on another planet.â
These poets, in short, inspired each other. Lowell always seems to be stuffing her newest poem into his billfold, so he can take it out later like a hundred-dollar bill. Bishop saw immediately how strange and even shocking âLife Studiesâ (1959) was (its confessional style caused as violent an earthquake in American poetry as âThe Waste Landâ); but he noticed something more subtle, that she rarely repeated herself. Each time she wrote, it was as if she were reinventing what she did with words, while he tended to repeat his forms until he had driven them into the ground, or driven everyone crazy with them. Bishop was loyal enough to admire, or pretend to, even Lowellâs mediocre poems.
If Lowell and Bishop often seem to love no poems more than each otherâs, as critics perhaps they were right. A hundred years from now, they may prove the 20th centuryâs Whitman and Dickinson, an odd couple whose poems look quizzically at each other, half in understanding, half in consternation, each poet the counter-psyche of the other. Their poems are as different as gravy from groundhogs, their letters so alike â so delightfully in concord â the reader at times canât guess the author without glancing at the salutation.
