When Elizabeth Bishop met Robert Lowell, in 1947, she had just published her first collection of poems, North & South. Lowell had just published his second, Lord Weary’s Castle, which later that year would win the Pulitzer Prize. Despite Bishop’s overwhelming shyness (she once described herself as “painfully—no, excruciatingly—shy”) they hit it off, so much so that the following year Lowell would come close to proposing to her (“Asking you is the might have been for me,” he wrote her a decade later, “the one towering change, the other life that might have been had”). And Bishop would later admit that she might have accepted.

In 1951 Bishop moved to Brazil, where she lived with her partner, Lota de Macedo Soares, for the next eighteen years. Her relationship with Lowell was kept alive, though, largely through their letters—the pair exchanged nearly five hundred over the next three decades. (Their complete correspondence, from which this edited selection is drawn, will be published later this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.) The letters act as a kind of topographical map of the poets’ personal and creative lives. They chart Lowell’s periodic descents into psychosis, his three marriages, and his rise to become the most influential postwar poet in America. Of Bishop, living more quietly in Brazil, they offer elaborations on a sensibility that, combined with technical mastery, would cause her to win the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The letters also offer vivid glimpses behind the scenes of what poet James Merrill has called “her own instinctive, modest, lifelong impersonations of an ordinary woman.”

—Dominic Luxford

Briton Cove, Cape Breton

August 14th, 1947

Dear Robert,

(I’ve never been able to catch that name they call you but Mr. Lowell doesn’t sound right, either.) I had meant to write to you quite a while ago, to answer the note you sent me in New York, and I certainly meant to do it before your review of my book appeared in the Sewanee Review—but someone sent me the magazine so it is too late now. I agreed with your review of Dylan Thomas completely—his poems are almost always spoiled for me by two or three lines that sound like padding or remain completely unintelligible. I haven’t read [William Carlos Williams’s] Paterson but your review is the first one that has made me feel I must. The part about me I was quite overwhelmed by. It is the first review I’ve had that attempted to find any general drift or consistency in the individual poems and I was beginning to feel there probably wasn’t any at all....