Elizabeth Bishop and the Ethics of Correspondence

Among the letters published for the first time in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell is a 1970 missive from Bishop.¹ She is reading about Thomas Carlyle, she tells Lowell, and may try to “finish” a “poem about him I’ve had around for years.”² She never did finish it, however, and the poem is not exactly about “him.” A draft appears posthumously as “Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle,”³ and it narrates an incident taken from Jane Carlyle’s correspondence, in which Thomas meets his wife in a busy street after missing her at “The Swan With Two Necks.”⁴ Bishop’s worksheets hail that place-name in what seems to be a final stanza, affirming the doubled bird as a symbol of the Carlyles’ relationship—and the epistolary dynamics of that relationship in particular. Bishop suggests the “Swan With Two Necks” as a model of correspondence when she rewrites Jane’s letter’s anecdote about returning with the “mail from Liverpool” at a mail-coach inn.

This poetic draft helps to articulate Bishop’s conception of a correspondent two-ness. Critics have begun to describe the crucial, indeterminate ambit of Bishop’s epistolary transactions: Langdon Hammer describes a productively unspecified “third area” in what is still the best analysis of Bishop’s correspondent practice, and Heather Treseler analyzes a zone of “epistolary relationship” in her study of Bishop’s correspondent poems.⁵ It is important to note the dyadism of letters, however, in order to understand their implications for Bishop and others of her era. Letters link a particular “I” and a particular “you” rather than dividing a specific “I” from a general “they” (or even a general “we”). With this duality, they articulate a kind of writing that is neither singular nor collective, personal nor political. Letters are ethical, rather, insofar as that term can indicate a principled attention to intersubjective exchange.⁶ Correspondent ethics provides models of selfhood, morality, and publicity that are particuarly relevant to a writer of Bishop’s time.⁷ If Bishop seems increasingly central to her era for both critics and subsequent poets, it is in part because she recognizes this epistolary potential—and shows, too, the problems and questions attendant on its realization. These problems mean that Bishop’s ideas of correspondent practice may be most richly evident in the work of one of her correspondents: this essay concludes with a letter-poem by May Swenson, “Dear Elizabeth,” that realizes the epistolary ethics suggested in Bishop’s own writing.

To recognize epistolary ethics is to grant earnest respect to a seemingly casual form, a type of appreciation important to Bishop. As Jonathan Ellis describes, Bishop saw letters as a genre in their own right: in the many letters she wrote, she mentions the many letters she read, including correspondence of Byron, Chekov, Coleridge, Hart Crane, Creevey, Fitzgerald, Hardy, Hopkins, Henry James, Keats, Millay, Sydney Smith, Madame de Sévigné, Stevens, Queen Victoria, Walpole, and Yeats, among others.⁸ When she taught at Harvard, her one seminar not focused on poetry is titled “Letters: Readings in Personal Correspondence, Famous and Infamous, from the 16^th to the 20^th Centuries.”⁹ Bishop writes (in a letter) that while she plans to include a “nicely incongruous assortment of people” on her syllabus, first among them “Mrs. Carlyle,” she intends to discuss correspondence “as an art form or something”—a phrase that takes letters seriously even as it qualifies their seriousness.¹⁰ The paradox fits Bishop’s own career, since her ascendancy as a major writer has been buoyed by celebrations of her minor affect: by 2006, David Orr collects adjectives like “modest” when he declares on the front page of The New York Times Book Review that in “the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop.”¹¹ Appreciation of Bishop, moreover, draws particularly from the “medium” of epistolarity, consolidating around the 1994 publication of her collected letters and continuing through the 2010 reception of Words in Air and the 2011 appearance of her correspondence...