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4.0 

Words in Air

By Elizabeth Bishop & Robert Lowell &
Words in Air by Elizabeth Bishop & Robert Lowell &  digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that "you ha[ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend."

The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "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." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977.

Presented in Words in Air is the complete correspondence between Bishop and Lowell. The substantial, revealing—and often very funny—interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets.

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3 Reviews

4.0
“I like this book! It is all the correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell over their lifetimes. They shared poetry and reviewed poetry of other poets of the time. It's a snapshot of literature history. It's romantic that they had a longstanding relationship, deep and true but were never lovers. Sometimes I read the pining in between the lines of their letters or their poetry. My favorite poem is by Lowell for Bishop, just a bit of it below Have you seen an inchworm crawl on a leaf, cling to the very end, revolve in air, feeling for something to reach to something? Do you still hang your words in air, ten years unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps or empties for the unimaginable phrase-- unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect?”

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