Volume 41, Number 11 · June 9, 1994
Breakfast with Miss Bishop
By Helen Vendler
One Art: Letters
by Elizabeth Bishop, selected and edited by Robert Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 668 pp., $35.00
At Harvard, in the fall of 1971, Elizabeth Bishop taught a seminar entitled 'Personal Correspondence, Famous and Infamous.' Because letter writing has traditionally been considered a minor art, even the best letter writers among the poets—Byron, Keats, Hopkins, dickinson—are taught and written about principally as poets. Almost no one knows how to account for the charm and power that letters can have. Because the writer of letters does not practice the 'perfectly useless concentration' that Bishop saw as the mark of poetry, they can hardly be made the object of explication de texte in the classic sense.
Review, 4275 words
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