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...
