Customer Reviews

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

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This correspondence is one long (nearly a thousand pages) love letter between two of the best poets of their generation. Both Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell were personally tortured by their demons (her was alcohol, his was manic-depression) and failed relationships. Though never lovers, their's was a marriage of the minds via the mail for thirty years. It is helpful, though not vital, that the reader be acquainted with their poetry -- the letters have more meaning and one can understand the fuss they had with their written creations. This definiative collection of their letters is a biography of their adult lives.

This has been my bedtime reading for a month now and what a lovely way to end the day.

They lived apart, continents apart, but close in spirit. Their letters are gossipy, smart, unguarded, critical of each others' work, supportive through triumphs and awful trials. They say things to each other that they never would have voiced aloud. (Sometimes they get catty, and mostly they are right.)

As their careers progress, you follow a poem by poem progression. The letters made me aware of the extent to which their poems were written in response to the work of the other, and the importance of their prose and translation to the poems for which they are now famous.

It's a nice book too, a good design, and a fine thing in hand. My only complaint is that the footnotes (which are fascinating) are printed in a tiny font that's almost too small for my tired eyes.

I may be regarded as prejudiced but I have long followed the life and poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. This book not only solidified by love of her work but extended it.

I spent two and a half years reading Words In Air - reading fifty- or hundred-page chunks between other books - and I think it is the best thing I have read in a very long time. I knew nothing about Elizabeth Bishop or Robert Lowell when I entered their thirty year correspondence (I just like books of letters) and I got to know them, their brilliant poems, their debilitating faults, and the lives of poets (or some poets) from the 1940's to the 1970's. I spent more time than I ever expected trying to understand a defense of Ezra Pound, I researched their favorite books (including Bishop's favorite 19th Century animal fiction, Rolf in the Woods), I listened to the classical pieces they referenced (or dwelt on), I found the Google Street View of their past residences. I didn't become obsessed but - when I was in the book - I felt somehow enmeshed in those two lives. Books of letters leave things out: while reading the very last letter of Words In Air I discovered a rather important bit of gossip about Bishop and American literature that either was glossed over or I missed a few hundred pages earlier. So when some time passes, maybe a few years, I'm going to reopen the book and start again, picking up the pieces I missed and reliving these two lives.

I'm with Elizabeth, when she snaps at Lowell that writing a good poem isn't worth hurting other people that much. I admit this book's art, and envy others' enjoyment of it, but what if you can't bear Lowell's personality and only read it for EB's sake? Much gnashing of teeth. They remind me eerily of another mismatched power couple, who are fond of each other when apart: Bill and Hilary Clinton. Lowell's sense of his own importance to poetry, which gives him the right to do anything he wishes to lesser mortals, is Bill-Clintonian. Lowell's as reckless, as destructive and self destructive, but also as charming to women. (Who are his profession, as much as poetry is.) It has been said, "Hilary loves Bill; and Bill loves Bill." Why can't such intelligent women see through these charming sociopaths? Think of Arendt and that creep Heidegger. Lowell is always running back to EB, crying like Brando in Streetcar. Difficult for a man to read, but if you're an intelligent woman with EB's weakness for "bad boys," then lady, be my guest.