It seemed unlikely on the face of it that two big books of letters, each of which could serve as a doorstop, would be so absorbing. But I recently found that re-reading The Letters of Robert Lowell and Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell issued me into a world as vivid as that of a novel—more vivid, really, because the world evoked in these letters is peopled with real men and women, against a backdrop of the times during which the letter-writers were active. The letters became an alternative reality I was eager to escape into, leaving behind what came to seem the paler reality of the world in which I actually live.

Their correspondence indirectly tells the life stories of both poets, and this is a good thing, since we lack a definitive biography of either. Each of these two personalities was of such complexity, encompassing such contradictions, that an unusually gifted biographer would be required, someone who could take it all on board, and so far such a person has not appeared in either case. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It by Brett C. Millier (2009) is not a bad book, but it is less helpful than it might be. For starters, Millier taxes Bishop for not being as “political” as her biographer would like her to have been on gender issues—and explicitly political was exactly what the skeptical Bishop never was and