To read Bishop’s letters on the heels of the public prose is to shift abruptly from the achieved personal impersonality of the most crafted literature into relaxation of the emphatically personal. I don’t mean “personal” in terms of contents but in terms of address. A poem or an essay is intransitive; it aspires to a universalized reader sensibility. A true letter, no matter how carefully written, is never anything but a one-to-one transitive document. These letters are of interest — how could they not be? — yet they also are valuable not only for the characteristic grace of expression but for the glimpses they offer of a literary time and place. Recipients include Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, Frank Bidart, May Swenson, and editor Schwartz. Bishop comes across as a vigilant, sensitive, engaged correspondent, not afraid to offer literary opinions, or, when need be, to set an editor straight (as a four-page itemized response to an article about her work in the journal Salmagundi attests). Whether a canon-making volume like this needs to reprint letters when they exist in a substantive separate volume is another question.
Finally, Schwartz and Giroux have provided a richly annotated chronology of the poet’s life, almost a mini-essay in itself. Reading it in conjunction with the selections, which are arranged chronologically within their respective genres, we partake in the densely woven to-and-fro between the art and the life. To close the book is to realize how the former has now fully absorbed the latter.
“CELEBRATING ELIZABETH BISHOP” | Lloyd Schwartz et al. reading from her work | MIT Room 6-120, 77 Mass Ave, Cambridge | March 6 at 7 pm | 617.253.7894
Related:
Winter reads, Year in Books: Word plays, Winter harvest, More 
- Winter reads
Esteemed fiction writers, young stars, the Civil War, the ’60s, and the morass of contemporary geopolitics — it’s all here for reading during winter’s long, dark nights.
- Year in Books: Word plays
Here, listed alphabetically by author, are 10 of the best works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry that the Phoenix wrote about in 2008.
- Winter harvest
"I don’t want to be here,” soprano Susan Larson lamented in her moving eulogy to her old friend and colleague Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.
- Lloyd Schwartz: the beat goes on
Classical-music critic Lloyd Schwartz recently marked his 30th year as a Phoenix contributor.
- Harvard Square
Harvard Square was very different 40 years ago.
- War and peace
Since September 11, publishers have been rushing to supply Americans with non-fiction books about the war on terror, the war in Iraq, and anything relating to the upheavals in the Middle East.
- High Numbers
This article originally appeared in the March 19, 1993 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
- War, peace, and Robert Pinsky
Every few years, a fall publishing season emerges that should remind us that Boston could be the literary epicenter of America.
- Orpheus in the afterworld
Tomsic’s last Boston recital was four years ago. We can’t afford to be without her this long.
- Hail and farewell
The season’s most eagerly awaited (and, with its $187 top ticket price, most expensive) classical concert was not a disappointment.
- Ralph Hamilton
My lovable, impossible friend of more than 30 years, the artist Ralph Hamilton, died on February 19, of complications from diabetes. He was only 59. It’s a very sad loss. He was one of Boston’s most original and searching painters and had been doing some of his most ambitious and moving work.
- Less
Topics:
Books
, Media, Elizabeth Bishop, Poetry, More
, Media, Elizabeth Bishop, Poetry, Robert Lowell, Robert Giroux, Alice Quinn, Aldous Huxley, Edgar Allan Poe, Frank Bidart, Less
