Words in Air

Three decades of correspondence between two great twentieth-century American poets: "A brilliant testament to the pleasure and power of good company. . . . These two lifetimes of mutual admiration make for irresistible reading" (Oprah.com). " Words in Air takes its place—amid the letters of Keats and Hopkins and Owen—as one of the great poetic correspondences." — The Atlantic Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, "You [have] 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. "The pleasures of this remarkable correspondence lie in the untiring way these poets entertained each other with the comic inadequacies of the world." — The New York Times Book Review " Words in Air may be the only book of its precise kind ever published: the lifelong correspondence between two artists of equal genius." — The New Yorker "This volume takes its place, along with the correspondence between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, or Kinglsey Amis and Philip Larkin, as consummated examples of wit, affection, and indeed—in the case of Bishop and Lowell—love." — Boston Sunday Globe