Turning Pain Into Art

Elizabeth Bishop, then 35, and Robert Lowell, almost 30, met in 1947 at a dinner in New York City hosted by Randall Jarrell. They struck up an unusual lifelong friendship fueled by mutual admiration, genuine devotion, and the fact that they rarely saw each other—which meant that in their correspondence they could divulge their best and worst selves, without the friction of actual contact. Each felt that the other had what he or she was missing. Bishop (shy, hesitant) saw “assurance” in Lowell and he (wayward, erratic) saw “unerring” judgment in her. Both led lives marked by tragedy and illness, and as they navigated an era during which American poetry took a sharp turn toward the personal, they became each other’s best reader. “I think I must write entirely for you,” Lowell told Bishop. She agreed, in her dry way: “I feel profoundly bored with all the contemporary poetry except yours,—and mine that I haven’t written yet.”

Now Bishop and Lowell are once again together, with the release of a pair of unorthodox biographies, Megan Marshall’s and Kay Redfield Jamison’s . Neither is quite the definitive new biography we might wish for. Marshall, who incorporates reminiscences of her own time studying poetry with Bishop at Harvard, makes good use of letters that became available only after