[In the following essay, Spires reviews One Art: Letters, finding the volume a “magnificent” addition to Bishop's canon.]

If an unknown poet were to be offered a sort of cosmic bargain where he or she would live the life Elizabeth Bishop lived in return for the poems she wrote, I doubt there would be many takers. From infancy on, Bishop suffered some of the worst losses imaginable. Her father, a prosperous builder from a wealthy New England family, died in 1911 when she was eight months old. Her Canadian mother then suffered a series of nervous breakdowns that led to her permanent institutionalization in an asylum in Halifax when Elizabeth was five; Bishop never saw her again. Cared for first by her maternal grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia, a relatively secure and happy time, she lived briefly and quite unhappily with her paternal grandparents in Worcester, Massachusetts, and then with a favorite aunt until she was old enough to go away to boarding school. From childhood on, she suffered from terrible asthma and allergies; in her twenties and thirties, after repeated devastating episodes of uncontrollable “binge” drinking, she began to realize that her system was intolerant of alcohol. It was a problem she struggled with, with varying degrees of success, her entire life. Out of these early losses, crises, and dislocations, she, miraculously, formed herself into a poet.

A magnificent volume of Bishop's letters, [One Art: Letters], edited by her longtime editor and friend Robert Giroux, has now been published. It opens in 1928, when Bishop was seventeen, and concludes on October 6, 1979, the day she died. One of the marvels of this collection, which includes some wonderful photographs and a very helpful introduction and chronology, is how present Bishop's voice, tone, and sensibility were even in adolescence. Though most of the poems she wrote as a student at Vassar, with the exception of “The Map,” could be classed as talented juvenilia, her early letters document a remarkably articulate and self-possessed young woman: lively, intellectually sophisticated, modest and well-mannered while at the same time direct and unapologetic. In one, in the “pre-feminist” age of 1933, she takes Donald Stanford, then a Harvard undergraduate (who would later become a co-editor of The Southern Review), to task:

And one thing more—what on earth do you mean when you say my perceptions are “almost impossible for a woman's”? “Now what the hell,” as you said to me, “you know that's meaningless.” And if you really do mean anything by it, I imagine it would make me very angry. Is there some glandular reason which prevents a woman from having good perceptions, or what?

In another, she presents a delightfully idiosyncratic and acute picture of the workings of poetic intuition:

Have you ever noticed how you can learn more about other people—more about how they feel, how it would feel to be them—by hearing them cough or make one of those innumerable inner noises, than by watching them for hours? Sometimes if another person hiccups, particularly if you haven't been paying much attention to him, why you get a sudden sensation as if you were inside him—you know how he feels in the little aspects he never mentions, aspects which are, really, indescribable to another person and must be realized by that kind of intuition. Do you know what I am driving at? Well, if you can follow those rather hazy sentences—that's what I quite often want to get into poetry. …

Although she avoided taking any formal classes in “verse-writing,” her energy and aspirations at Vassar centered around writing and poetry. In one of those fortunate conjunctions of timing and luck, the college librarian provided the young poet with an introduction to Marianne Moore, with whom Bishop struck up a lifelong friendship and correspondence. For years, Moore was mentor, friend, and advocate, as well as an unconscious mother-figure (Bishop's own mother died in 1934, several months after her first meeting with Moore). Bishop's early letters to Moore are models of decorum: humorous, affectionate, anecdotal, self-effacing, and considerate. If two of the distinguishing features of a great letter-writer are the desire to please and the desire to entertain, Bishop was able to do both. Her famous poet's eye is evident in the letters she sent Moore from Key West, where she lived off and on from 1937 to 1949:

The other night I went to hear the “Independent Quartette” of Atlanta, which had been making a sensation at Lillian's (the present maid's) church. … They were really a sextet and extremely good—the best thing of the sort I've ever heard down here. They wore zoot suits of narrow black and gray stripes, enormously padded shoulders, coats to the knees, and yellow shoes with knobs on the toes, very high collars, tie pins, black ties, white handkerchiefs arranged in four points, enormous white carnations, and around their necks on cords hung crosses three or four inches long that glittered like emeralds and rubies. In spite of all this and their rather lurid presentations—they prefaced their hymns with “Give us a hand, dear Christian friends”—they sang marvelously, and acted out some of the songs in a very queer dreamlike way, walking around the church and making very large, slow gestures. At one point they ran what they called a “contest.” Each one put a handsome white silk muffler around his throat and took up a collection, individually—apparently 10¢ was a “point,” and the littlest one, the bass, wrote the results down in a large account book. … The tenor won the “contest” and then showed off a little, humming a very high note until the audience nearly burst and then going off into a long falsetto yell. I almost thought I should wire Louise [Crane, an old friend and jazz enthusiast] about them—I don't think secularization would hurt them much!

But despite the delightful observations in many of the letters written from Key West, New York, Cape Cod, Maine, and Europe, the years from 1934 to 1951 show Bishop leading a peripatetic, lonely existence, checking in and out of residential hotels, renting apartments in New York for brief periods of time, traveling and visiting with lovers and friends, but without any real home, employment, or family to anchor her. And the years of the Depression and World War II were probably not good ones, from the standpoint of publishing, to be a young poet. It was not until 1946, after many rejections and frustrating delays, that her first book of poems, North & South, was published. With characteristic humor, she makes light of her difficulties to Robert Lowell during a lonely summer in Maine in 1948:

Well, things must improve, I'm sure, and the place is beautiful, there's no getting round that. I am working on Tobias and the Prodigal Son and I just started a story called “Homesickness”—all very cheerful. I think almost the last straw here though is the hairdresser, a nice big hearty Maine girl who asks me questions I don't even know the answers to. She told me (1) that my hair “don't feel like hair at all,” (2) I was turning gray practically “under her eyes.” And when I'd said yes, I was an orphan, she said, “Kind of awful, ain't it, plowing through life alone.” So now I can't walk downstairs in the morning or upstairs at night without feeling I'm plowing. There's no place like New England. …

By 1951, Bishop was at a crossroads. Her drinking was more and more out of control. A stay at Yaddo was a disaster and her time as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress unhappily unproductive. It was at this point that luck intervened and the course of her life changed forever. Awarded a traveling fellowship from Bryn Mawr, she voyaged alone to South America and fell violently ill in Rio with “Quinke's Edema,” brought on by an allergic reaction to a cashew fruit. She was invited to recuperate at the home of Lota de Macedo Soares, a lively, sophisticated woman from the Brazilian aristocracy, the two fell in love, and Bishop stayed on for fifteen years. Her relationship with Lota was a “marriage” in the true sense of the word, providing Bishop with a real home and a sense of security and constancy that had been lacking in her life. A letter to her physician and close friend, Dr. Anny Baumann, describes her new-found happiness:

… the drinking and the working both seem to have improved miraculously. Well no, it isn't miraculous really—it is almost entirely due to Lota's good sense and kindness. I still feel I must have died and gone to heaven without deserving to, but I am getting a little more used to it. …

I have two more birds, adorable little green and blue things, very tame. They love each other very much and live in a wonderful old homemade cage that resembles the dome of the Capitol in Washington.

The radical change in locale was good for her poetry as well as her psyche, leading her to new subject matter and freeing her to do some of her best work. She wrote to Baumann that “my Anglo-Saxon blood is gradually relinquishing its seasonal cycle and I'm quite content to live in complete confusion, about seasons, fruits, languages, geography, everything.” Her new surroundings not only inspired poems about Brazil but allowed her to return to long-repressed memories of her early childhood in Nova Scotia, including the central event of her life, her mother's mental breakdown, which she wrote about in a masterpiece story, “In the Village.” “It is funny to come to Brazil to experience total recall about Nova Scotia—geography must be more mysterious than we realize, even,” she mused to Kit and Ilse Barker in another letter. It was during this time that she won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her second book, A Cold Spring (1955), and finished another, Questions of Travel (1965)—her happiest book, I think, in which love and poetic vocation are presented as countervailing forces to loss and madness.

Letter-writing had always been important to Bishop but probably never more so than during her years in Brazil, since it was her only way to keep up with distant friends. She wrote to Ilse Barker, “I am sorry for people who can't write letters. But I suspect also that you and I, Ilse, love to write them because it's kind of like working without really doing it.”

The idyll of these early years in Brazil was not to last, despite Bishop's contentment with her expatriate existence. Her relationship with Lota began to deteriorate in the 1960s and ended with Lota's suicide in New York in 1967 (brought on, in part, by Lota's years of overwork and exhaustion as director of a huge park project in Rio). Unfairly blamed for Lota's death by some of their mutual friends, Bishop became an outsider in Brazil. Her letter to Maria Osser, written in San Francisco several months after Lota's death, is heartbreaking:

… I left Brazil with a very heavy heart and I hope never to see Rio again, although no doubt I'll have to. … I feel now as if I'd been living in a completely false world all the time—not false, but that no one ever liked me, really, or not many people, and all of them totally misunderstood the strength of the bonds between Lota and me. …

I'd give everything in this world—a foolish expression but I can't think what I'd give, but “everything,” certainly—to have Lota back and well—that is the awful thing about it all.

… There will never be anyone like her in this world or in my life, and I'll never stop missing her—but of course there is that business of “going on living”—one does it, almost unconsciously—something in the cells, I think. Do you think if all the above weren't true, I'd be here? … No—I'd be dead, too.

The hard-earned “art of losing” that she speaks of in her famous villanelle, “One Art” (“I lost two cities, lovely ones. And vaster, / some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent”), carried her through the worst time of her adult life. Bishop was forced, once again, to construct a completely new life for herself, this time in Boston. Although her last ten years were not poetically prolific, they were a time of honor and accolades as she published her last book, Geography III (1976), assumed a larger presence on the American literary scene, gave readings, taught at Harvard (including a course on letters, “Readings in Personal Correspondence, Famous and Infamous, from the 16th to 20th Centuries”), took dreamed-of trips to Greece and the Galapagos Islands with a new love, and added a younger generation of writers to her circle of friends.

Although it would be untrue to say her last years were “easy” or unqualifiedly happy—health problems and money worries were constantly on her mind—she had not only survived but survived in full possession of her mental, creative faculties, outliving many of the more flamboyant personalities of her poetic generation: Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, Roethke, Jarrell, Berryman, and, finally, Lowell. For some of us in the 1970s, myself included, Bishop was one of the few sane role models for a young poet starting out, a kind of one-woman corrective to the nineteenth-century romantic myth of the artist as an alienated figure bent on self-destruction. The handful of poems she managed to finish in those last years (about one a year)—“In the Waiting Room,” “Crusoe in England,” “The Moose,” and “Santarem,” to name some of the best—were, as Howard Moss, the poetry editor of The New Yorker, once put it, “one of the few examples of lucidity left in the world.”

These letters, besides giving the reader a beautifully detailed sense of the fabric of Bishop's daily life, contain fascinating glimpses into her poetic process, as embodied in her dreams, travel notes, false starts, and revisions. Writing to U. T. and Joseph Summers in 1955, Bishop reveals the donnée for “Varick Street” and “At the Fishhouses”:

I had an apartment right off Varick Street (lower Seventh Avenue) and there were printing presses across the street that kept going nights sometimes, using those pale blue daylight lights. Also Schrafft's factory was on one side and the Antiphlogistine place on the other, so in summer the odors became very strange. After one uncomfortable night I woke up reciting the refrain of … “Varick Street,” and it seemed somehow applicable to the commercial outlook and my pessimistic outlook on life in New York and in general at that time. It is a dream poem—the refrain was in time with the presses which were going full blast, and all of it, except a few fixed-up words toward the end, was in my head. … Quite a few lines of “At the Fishhouses” came to me in a dream, and the scene—which was real enough, I'd recently been there—but the old man and the conversation, etc., were all in a later dream.

Her remarkable dreams were source material not only for her own poems but for one of Lowell's as well. (Her poems and letters influenced him on more than one occasion.) An earlier letter of Bishop's written while she was in Stonington, Maine, recounts a dream that Lowell incorporated into his poem “Water,” which opens For the Union Dead:

I think you said a while ago that I'd “laugh you to scorn” over some conversation you and J. had had about how to protect yourself against solitude and ennui—but indeed I wouldn't. That's just the kind of suffering I'm most at home with & helpless about, I'm afraid, and what with two days of fog and alarmingly low tides, I've really got it bad & think I'll write you a note before I go out and eat some mackerel. The boats bringing the men back from the quarries look like convict ships & I've just been indulging myself in a nightmare of finding a gasping mermaid under one of those exposed docks—you know, trying to tear the mussels off the piles for something to eat—horrors.

In addition to providing glimpses into her own writing process, the letters contain vivid and compelling portraits, harsh as well as affectionate, of various literary contemporaries. About Mary McCarthy, a former friend and Vassar classmate, Bishop is unforgiving:

She's still saying some of the same things she said at college, apparently. Oh poor girl, really. You know, I think she's never felt very real, and that's been her trouble. She's always pretending to be something-or-other and never quite convincing herself or other people. When I knew her well I was always torn between being furious with her and being touched by her—because in those days her pretensions were so romantic and sad. Now that they're so grandiose, I suppose it's much harder to take. … Did you see her last effort in pr? The note said it was a chapter from a book called The Group and I already recognize the characters, more or less. … I have an awful feeling I'll probably appear in the book, and with all of Mary's second thoughts, heaven help me. It's fantastic writing—good, but without one shred of imagination, something that seems almost impossible—but Mary does it.

Reacting, in 1953, to the death of Dylan Thomas, whose poems she described as “just a straight conduit between birth and death … with not much space for living along the way,” Bishop sympathetically describes her first meeting with him at the Library of Congress to Pearl Kazin:

I felt frightened for him and depressed. Yet I found him so tremendously sympathetic at the same time. … Why do some poets manage to get by and live to be malicious old bores like Frost or—probably—pompous old ones like Yeats, or crazy old ones like Pound—and some just don't!

But his poetry has that desperate win-or-lose-all quality, of course—and of course it too eliminates everything from life except something almost beyond human supportability after a while. But why oh why did he have to go & die now? … Poets should have self-doubts left out of their systems completely—as one can see most of the surviving ones seem to have. But look at poor Cal—and Marianne, who hangs on just by the skin of her teeth and the most elaborate paranoia I've ever heard of. And of course it isn't just poets. We're all wretched and half the time or three-quarters I think it is a thoroughly disgusting world—and then the horror vanishes for a while, mercifully. But in my own minor way I know enough about drink & destruction.

And in one of the most revealing letters in the entire book, in terms of what it says about Bishop as a friend and as an artist, she writes an anguished letter to Lowell concerning his right to both quote from, and fabricate, painful personal letters from his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in his book-length poem The Dolphin:

If you were any other poet I can think of I certainly wouldn't attempt to say anything at all; I wouldn't think it was worth it. But because it is you, and a great poem (I've never used the word “great” before, that I remember), and I love you a lot—I feel I must tell you what I really think. …

Here is a quotation from dear little Hardy that I copied out years ago—long before Dolphin. …

“What should certainly be protested against, in cases where there is no authorization, is the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions. Infinite mischief would lie in that. If any statements in the dress of fiction are covertly hinted to be fact, all must be fact, and nothing else but fact, for obvious reasons. The power of getting lies believed about people through that channel after they are dead, by stirring in a few truths, is a horror to contemplate.”

I'm sure my point is only too plain. Lizzie is not dead, etc.—but there is a “mixture of fact & fiction,” and you have changed her letters. That is “infinite mischief,” I think. … One can use one's life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren't you violating a trust? if you were given permission—if you hadn't changed them … etc. But art just isn't worth that much. I keep remembering Hopkins's marvelous letter to Bridges about the idea of a “gentleman” being the highest thing ever conceived—higher than a “Christian,” even, certainly than a poet. It is not being “gentle” to use personal, tragic anguished letters that way—it's cruel.

Lowell, Bishop realized, had taken confessionalism to its most extreme point, sacrificing his life, and some of the people closest to him, to the service of art and blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction along the way. Her response reveals her own personal poetic reticence, in which painful events and characters from her own life often motivated poems without being used directly in them. In the same letter to Lowell, she admitted, “In general, I deplore the ‘confessional’—however, when you wrote Life Studies perhaps it was a necessary movement, and it helped make poetry more real, fresh, and immediate.” Her letter is an indicator of how painfully honest and direct she could be, not just with her dearest friends but with more casual literary acquaintances as well. The last letter she ever wrote, to poet and anthologist John Frederick Nims on the day she died, energetically begins, “I'm going to take issue with you—rather violently—about the idea of footnotes,” concludes darkly with the observation that “the teaching of literature now is deplorable,” and signs off, “Affectionately, Elizabeth.” From first to last, Bishop was her own person: upbeat and pessimistic, concerned and cranky, tolerant and opinionated, desperate and resilient. The contradictions and inconsistencies inherent in her personality are revealed in her letters with a startling clarity and candor. It is this rounded, imperfect, human quality that draws us into the letters and provides a very different version of her life (and one, I should add, that seems more true in tone and in the telling) than Brett Millier's recent biography of Bishop.

One thing is certain: Elizabeth Bishop was not a tragic figure. Perhaps the great losses of her childhood prepared her early on for the upheaval she experienced in her adult life. Surely one of her most attractive qualities as a poet and correspondent was her clear-eyed ability to see and accept the “awful but cheerful” quality of life that she described in “The Bight.” Yeats, if I'm remembering correctly, once described the ability of a great artist to hold two contraries in opposition. Bishop's letters, like her poems, are able to do this, aware as they are of the precariously balanced, two-sided quality of human experience. The act of writing poetry for her, as it is for all true poets, was a way to survive. Writing to Lowell at one point about his poems, she could have been speaking about her own:

They … have that sure feeling, as if you'd been in a stretch … when everything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry—or not material, seemed to be poetry, and all the past was illuminated in long shafts here and there, like a long-waited-for sunrise. If only one could see everything that way all the time! It seems to me it's the whole purpose of art, to the artist (not to the audience)—that rare feeling of control, illumination—life is all right, for the time being.