(1917–1977)
U.S. poet
Robert Lowell
I seem to spend my life missing you.
Letter to Elizabeth Bishop, Nov. 10, 1969, reprinted in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 655.
Living in New York after Boston is like discovering that there is oxygen in the air—people to talk to, plays, opera, and something in the air that somehow makes people very different here from what they are in Boston.
Letter to Elizabeth Bishop, dated February 15, 1961, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 350-51.
Psycho-therapy is rather amazing—something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium—chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct.
Letter to Elizabeth Bishop, dated November 18, 1949, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 92.
When are you sailing so I can meet you at the dock with champagne?
Letter to Elizabeth Bishop, dated April 24, 1952, in Words in Air (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 137.