Introduction

Abstract

It’s surprising to remember that Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell were once considered to be poets in rival camps. Bishop was once pervasively if (it now seems) implausibly thought of as an impersonal poet—and, not so implausibly, as an epistemological and aesthetic one. Lowell, conversely, was the inventor of “poetry as confession” (in the resonant phrase of M.L. Rosenthal), though his own epistemological concerns, and his complex engagement with a nuanced aesthetics, were often undervalued. More recently, readers and commentators—diving ever deeper into the manuscript record while reading the poems themselves more closely—have established the many threads binding these poets together, making them almost seem at times to be, as Bishop might say, “just one” (Poems 151). Lowell termed Bishop his “favorite poet and favorite friend” (Words 669), and Bishop would surely have returned the compliment.It’s no accident, then, that they produced what Dan Chiasson calls an “exhilarating” exchange of correspondence—the letters collected in Words in Air—for these two poets had much in common. Each wrote self-exploratory poetry and prose. Within that framework, each also explored culture, poetry, ethics, and all the factors that divide people and at the same time hold them together. It didn’t hurt that they were also, as Chiasson notes, “artists of equal genius” (np).Beyond their proclivity for psychological and social observation, both poets were highly skilled and original verbal artists. Both were cosmopolitan, though Bishop, especially, was also a significant eco-poet. Both established artistic and personal roots in other nations and continents, and they manifested something of the wandering compulsion that marked other mid-century poets (as Jeffrey Gray, among others, has shown). Yet home, the past, and family were recurrent and perhaps central poetic settings.Both Lowell and Bishop knew a wide range of poets and writers, whom they discussed and gossiped about in their letters, and about whom Lowell also wrote touching memoirs in prose and verse. Both were deeply engaged in social issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class—Lowell openly and Bishop with more reserve but no less power. Both poets channeled the fundamental unease of racial inequity, and they tried to rise to the challenge of exposing it, even if they did so inadequately at times. Both registered the fluidity of desire and the puzzling complications of identity and relationship.Both poets focused on childhood, having discovered that, as Lowell wrote, “always inside me is the child who died” (Collected 375). They dwelt on their own psychic fragility, and their particular versions of neurodiversity. They also reflected on the problematics of love, as we may see, to cite just a few examples, in Bishop’s The Cold Spring and her posthumous poems and in Lowell’s The Dolphin and his contributions to The Dolphin Letters. Each poet, both in prose and verse, was an innovator in the field of life writing. Each probed selfhood and the betweenness of subjectivities.Complementing their often-introspective projects, each of the poets had wide cultural reach. Both were fascinated by other languages and by the writing of others. They widened their horizons and refreshed their poetic impulse through translation. Lowell’s “imitations,” which are still controversial, reproduce and alter the work of ancient and modern European masters, whereas Bishop focused on contemporary poets and prose writers in Brazil, most of whom she knew personally. Each had a talent for poetry in dialogue with others. And each was frequently an ekphrastic poet, writing poems that concern themselves with painting and architecture and with how these more tangible artistic forms impinge themselves on the poet’s imagination.Bishop and Lowell had differences too, of course, including alternative tones, perspectives, concerns, and compulsions. Although they participated in a decades-long dialogue, this dialogue highlighted not only their commonalities but also their different identities, present circumstances, past traumas, and even their rivalries. If they never quite became “just one,” their very differences broaden the scope of scholarly investigation while highlighting the operations and complexities of love and friendship.The possibilities for ongoing exploration of the interweaving worlds of Bishop and Lowell seem almost limitless. They lend themselves to study as distinctly individual poets, as authors in relation to one another, as authors engaged in dialogue with diverse cultures, and as poets enmeshed in public and private history. Their individual and collective engagement with fellow writers—with forerunners, peers, and successors—are many and varied.Essays on all these subjects and more will be the raison d’être of Bishop-Lowell Studies. And so now, in this issue, auspiciously, the Bishop-Lowell Studies journal makes its beginning.