Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

The publication in 2008 of Words in Air: The Collected Correspondence of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop offers the reader a privileged glimpse into the long and emotional friendship between two major postwar American poets, who were each an active influence on the other's work. Bishop would enclose a poem in a 1961 letter to Lowell, claiming the draft "undoubtedly shows your influence" but also noting that "I'll probably make more changes" (Words in Air, 379). In a 1964 interview, Robert Lowell would claim Bishop as one of "the poets who most directly influenced me." (Kunitz 86). Indeed Travisano notes in his introduction to the letters that "Lowell's Life Studies and For the Union Dead, his most enduringly popular books, were written under Bishop's direct influence, as the letters make clear" (Words in Air, xviii). But those two titles mark a major shift in Lowell's...
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