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 interchange, for its sustained colloquial brilliance of style (with neither poet ever on stilts), for its keen observation of both the ordinary and the extraordinary spiced with a wealth of literary and social history and a smorgasbord of literary gossip, it is hard to think of a parallel.
As the correspondence began in 1947, Bishop was thirty-six and Lowell had recently turned thirty. David Kalstone, in his groundbreaking Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (1989), rightly observes that "they could not have met at a better moment." As poets, each had lately published a prizewinning first volume and was achieving substantial recognition for the first time. Bishop’s North & South (1946) had won the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Prize Fellowship, which included publication and a cash prize, for a book manuscript that triumphed over more than eight hundred rival submissions. Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle (1946), which included new poems as well as extensive revisions from his 1944 small press Land of Unlikeness, had won—still more impressively—the Pulitzer Prize, making him one of the youngest poets ever to receive that award. Indeed, while both poets would receive many public honors, including a Pulitzer for Bishop in 1956, Lowell would, throughout their lifetimes, continue to enjoy a public reputation that exceeded his friend’s. One prominent critic, Irvin Ehrenpreis, an admirer of both poets, dubbed their era "The Age of Lowell." Lowell appeared on a 1967 Time magazine cover and was regularly featured in other mainstream media not only for his poetry but for his left-of-center political interventions and for a life marked by widely publicized mental breakdowns. Bishop, by contrast, shunned publicity, was retiring by temperament, and lived for long periods in Key West or Brazil, remote from the major American cultural centers, and her work was intensely prized by a narrower circle. Bishop tended to be thought of while living as, in John Ashbery’s now-famous phrase, a "writer’s writer’s writer." In the years since her death, however, Bishop’s reputation has risen dramatically, fully catching up with Lowell’s, and in the eyes of some, surpassing it. These admiring friends are now linked in many readers’ minds—as they were in Jarrell’s six decades before—as perhaps the two outstanding American poets of their talented mid-century generation.
On a more personal level, as Kalstone observes, their 1947 meeting came at "an unsettled time for both of them," with Lowell finalizing a divorce from Jean Stafford and Bishop facing the end of a longstanding relationship with Key West resident Marjorie Stevens. In their friendship’s first two years, Bishop and Lowell would pass through a shifting and somewhat ambiguous phase of mutual attraction. Several friends thought they might soon become engaged. Bishop remained wary, however—her long-term relationships had always been with women, and she feared instability on both sides. Lowell, who had carried the thought within him that he might one day propose, later acknowledged that he could never find the right moment: "like a loon that needs sixty feet, I believe, to take off from the water, I wanted time and space, and went on assuming." Beginning in February 1949, while staying at Yaddo, the famous writers colony, Lowell suffered one of the most severe and prolonged bipolar episodes in a lifetime of severe bipolar episodes. During the long recovery process he became engaged to Elizabeth Hardwick, who had been present at Yaddo and who had supported him through this traumatic experience. They married in July of that year, and in 1950, with Lowell now recovered, he and Hardwick departed for Europe, where they would spend the next two years.
Bishop herself was suffering from bouts of depression at that time and was looking for a fresh personal direction. In 1951, on a visit to Brazil which Bishop intended to be the first leg of a freighter trip around South America, she suffered an acute allergic reaction to the fruit of the cashew. While recovering in Rio, she fell in love with Lota de Macedo Soares, a remarkable woman with whom she would spend the next sixteen years, mostly in Brazil. The lives of these two poets had taken decisively different directions since their first meeting, yet in 1957 Lowell confessed that "asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had." In 1954, lamenting the distance that separated them now that Bishop was established in and outside of Rio while he had settled down as a poet and teacher in his native Boston, Lowell observed, "We seem attached to each other by some stiff piece of wire, so that each time one moves, the other moves in another direction. We should call a halt to that." But they never did, and as Kalstone notes of Bishop, "After 1950, her friendship with Lowell was one of frequent letters and infrequent visits."
Yet their letters served as a powerful and self-renewing form of attachment, and as their correspondence moved forward year by year, Lowell sent along his poems in fresh batches or in book-length typescripts or proofs to Bishop for her appreciation and critique. According to their mutual friend Frank Bidart, Lowell used frequently to cite W. H. Auden’s remark that "The best reader is someone who is crazy about your work but doesn’t like all of it." Lowell found that kind of reader in Bidart, who would one day coedit his Collected Poems (2003), and he found it some years earlier in Bishop. She, too, was crazy about hi
