How Verse Influences Verse

...Chronic ill health and periodic bouts of alcoholism often disabled her...

...Hinten argues that this reflects wu, the Taoist concept of "the emptiness that precedes and follows existence...

...The original has only recently been reconstructed but its story runs throughout Chinese literature...

...By contrast, Bishop composed slowly—sometimes letting ideas mature for decades...

...In Bishop's poems profound psychological perceptions combine with reticence and understatement to convey more than the most fervid rhetorical descriptions...

...Hinten has performed a dual service...

...For a while, Lota worked closely with Governor Carlos Lacerda in redesigning Rio de Janeiro...

...As a young woman Bishop was close to Marianne Moore, the Great Lady of Modernism, but never became a disciple...

...or William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge discussing politics and the sublime while strolling through the Grasmere Lake District...

...In this account, the human heart-mind is an integral part of the starry universe, its complex and finally unfathomable movements of thought and feeling swirling through the grand movements of the stars...

...They prompted Lowell to write, in 1965, with a tragic lack of foresight: "How wonderful you are Dear, and how wonderful that you write me letters___In this midsummer moment I feel at peace, and that we both have more or less lived up to our so different natures and destinies...

...A lyric from the first century B.C.E...

...the first Chinese poet to veer away from formal tradition, strive for a natural voice, and incorporate personal experiences—sounds something like Elizabeth Bishop: It's true, of course...

...V Woolf, K.A...

...Lowell's work possesses the breadth and fearlessness that are the marks of our greatest poets...

...More than a little in love with her, he coveted her self-containment and sharp eye for detail, not to mention her unerring ear for false notes...

...Moore's poem begins, "I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle," yet she concludes that poetry is essential for its power to create "imaginary gardens with real toads...

...Ancient Middle Eastern and European poets wrote epics about battles, their Chinese counterparts—even as they witnessed war—tended to dwell on landscapes and people...

...Grammar is ambiguous: "Prepositions and conjunctions are rarely used leaving relationships between lines, phrases, ideas, and images unclear...

...It also emphasizes a universal principle: The greatest influence on verse is other verse...

...Nonetheless, many ancient Chinese poems contain familiar echoes—largely because they have influenced or been imitated by many modern writers...

...Relationships among poets advance the art, delighting our imaginations even as we gain insight into our own inner landscapes...

...During his lifetime (1917-1977), Lowell gained greater renown...

...Like George Herbert, she can talk about unhappiness with a rueful acceptance and serenity, illuminating the texture of existence in all its particularity—"awful but cheerful," as she puts it in "The Bight," one of her most powerful poems...

...But Words in A ir confirms my conviction that the current judgment is unfair...

...The Dolphin (1973), his account in verse of this transition, caused his sharpest disagreement with Bishop, who was horrified by his liberal borrowings from Hardwick's distraught letters...

...This would be fascinating merely for the gossip—both were witty observers of the major literary and political figures who crossed their paths...

...A nameyou can name isn't theperennial name: the named is mother to the ten thousand things, but the unnamed is origin to all heaven and earth The wise foolishness of the Beats or Robert Bly can be heard here...

...The scion of a venerable New England family, naturally gregarious, he thrived in the literary culture of the time and briefly basked in the political glamour of the Kennedys’ “Camelot” court...

...More significantly, the correspondence clarifies their profound influence on each other’s writing...

...David Hinton's Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology (Farrar Straus Giroux, 512 pp., $45.00) now provides a reintroduction to this often borrowed tradition...

...Unlike Lowell, she keptthese private, as she did her homosexuality...

...The later poets in Hinton 's collection had entered a decadent "silver age" of cynical reflections on human behavior, including rueful musing on drunkenness and womanizing...

...For instance, these lines of Lao Tzu: A Way you can call Way isn't the perennial Way...

...the distinction between singular and plural is only rarely and indirectly made...

...Nevertheless, she did teach Lowell to anchor his ideas in life rather than in symbolic action, and he became a better writer for it...

...By placing our inner psychology within the space of the sky," Hinten observes, "the poem enacts a different account of the human interior...

...He, in turn, helped her to overcome some of her reticence...

...Elizabethan lyricists borrowed French devices, as did some of the early Modernists, and later John Ashbery...

...Some of these resemblances may be unconscious on Hinton's part, some deliberate...

...Lowell’s parents “drowned” their only son in their own dysfunctions, leaving him torn between “the Puritanical iron hand of constraint and . . . gushes of pure wildness...

...until shortly before her death, Bishop (1911-1979) remained something of a poet’s poet...

...One intriguing feature of the culture is that written Chinese has differed so markedly from the spoken vernacular that "classical Chinese was a literary language alive primarily in a body of literary texts, which means that it remained relatively unchanged across millennia...

...or Ezra Pound and T.S...

...And it ends returned into all empty absence...

...Yet her work, too, will endure for its distinctive clarity and wisdom...

...Some of its characters retain elements of the original pictographs— so that the words for "stairs" or "grass" visually suggest ladders and stalks...

...Eliot shoring up fragments of cultural ruins in the wake of World War I. Now W o r d s in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (Farrar Straus Giroux, 928 pp., $45.00), edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton, details the fruitful relationship of two of the late 20th century’s most influential American poets...

...According to legend, Su Hui was the wife of a highranking government official, but the couple's happiness was marred by her jealousy of her husband's favorite concubine...

...But the idyllic life she and the Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares made for themselves began to fall apart as the country destabilized...

...very often the subjects, verbs and objects of verbal action are absent...

...Porter, E. Bowen, R. West, etc.—they are all full of it...

...The tradition lacks works with the panoramic sweep of "Gilgamesh," "The Iliad" "The Aeneid" the Eddas, or "La Chanson de Roland...

...In her loneliness Su Hui composed "Star Gauge," a grid in numerous colors that can be read in endless ways, generating several thousand possible poems...

...Her father died a few months after her birth...

...The same maybe true of certain prominent American poets...

...Sadly, the most tragic phases of their lives were still to come...

...The stunning lyrics of Geography 111(1916) represented a new kind of intimacy for Bishop, free of her earlier evasions of personal material...

...Thus meaning moves ceaselessly, like the heavens themselves, orbiting around hsin—the word for "heart and mind" and also the Pole Star...

...Although Hinten does not mention it, according to many of the legends Su Hui wove the poem on her loom...

...Exposure to East European and South American poetry helped English and U. S. poets of the mid-20th century reinvent themselves...

...Bishop resented the notion of being anyone's muse—even Lowell's...

...These astronomical instruments, probably invented by the Chinese, became popular in the Near East and the West during the Middle Ages...

...In recent years, Bishop's reputation has eclipsed Lowell's...

...As Brazil's political situation disintegrated Lota descended into depression and Bishop began to look elsewhere for emotional support...

...When the Sinologist Arthur Waley began publishing translations of Chinese verse in the 1920s, the short-lived AngloAmerican "Imagist" movement seized on its concentrated images...

...Lota committed suicide in Bishop's New York apartment in 1969...

...Despite many fallow periods and frequent bipolar breakdowns that his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, compared to living through a Dostoyevsky novel, “only much more painful,” Lowell published 18 books of verse, translations and plays, to Bishop’s four slim verse collections, several prose collections, and some English renderings of Brazilian writing...

...China has prized verse from the 15th century B.C.E...

...What else...

...She envied his prolific output and tried not to be “jealous” of his candor about his own experiences (including three marriages to writers, madness, and the burden of following his famous ancestors...

...The last poem in the anthology, by the 12th-century master Yang Wan-Li, is entitled "Don't Read Books"—a kind of Asian version of Marianne Moore's famous "Poetry...

...Remorse over this loss engendered some of Bishop's most moving writing...

...Many of these letters have been published individually in other collections...

...Lowell was then too manic to understand what she meant...

...About one of Lowell’s protégés she observed waspishly: “That Anne Sexton I think still has a bit too much romanticism and what I think of as the ‘our beautiful old silver' school of female writing which is really boasting about how 'nice' we were...

...She had returned to the States just at the moment Lowell precipitously left the long-suffering Hardwick and their young daughter for the volatile Lady Caroline Blackwood...

...Su Hui, one of the relatively rare women poets of the tradition, writing in the 4th century CE., devised a poem Hinten titles "Star Gauge," based on an armillary sphere: a threedimensional map of the heavens meantto gauge the movements of stars and planets...

...there are no verb tenses, so temporal location and sequence are vague...

...Merwin has acknowledged his debt to Buddhist poets and published his own translations of them...

...In a happy ending, the poet's husband was so stirred by his wife's expression of love and longing that he returned to her...

...entitled "Watering Horses at a Spring Beneath the Great Wall" opens with melancholy lines that could easily have been penned by Robert Lowell in the early 1970s, around the time he published History: Riverside grass so lavish and azure-green, those distant roads, I'm longing in gossamer skeins unceasing, distant roads I can't bear longing, longing...

...Bishop's lengthy letters describing daily existence in the Brazilian countryside and the intricacies, corruption and violent upheavals of the country's politics are enthralling documents...

...Bishop pleaded "I love you so much I can't bear to have you publish something that I regret and that you might live to regret, too...

...At 40, she moved to Brazil...

...Life's its own mirage of change...

...Occasionally Chinese poets developed innovative forms untried in the West until quite recently...

...When he was appointed governor of a distant province, Su Hui refused to accompany him unless the concubine was left behind, and he departed with his mistress...

...Early in their friendship, Lowell wrote in praise of Bishop's poem about a fish, "I'm a fisherman myself, but all my fish became symbols, alas...

...when she was four, her mother was permanently institutionalized...

...His volume reminds us of much that has entered into our own literary tradition while exposing us to many concepts alien to Western thought...

...He moved to England with her, where they had a child while waiting for his divorce from Hardwick...

...Although sickly, she was a good student and graduated from Vassar, where Mary McCarthy was a classmate...

...By including both sides of the conversation, Wo r ds in Air allows us to listen in on an intimate dialogue between two people who were arguably closer to each other than to any spouse or lover...

...She was a deeply private person who spent 16 years of her life in Brazil, outside the American mainstream...

...Consider those evenings at London’s Mermaid Tavern with William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe, sitting over their drinks, reinventing English verse...

...Bishop, by contrast, taught her admirers that verse need not shout and that capturing the texture of a landscape can be more revealing than gothic psychodrama...

...His powerful rhetoric, however, tended to cramp his would-be disciples, who risked swamping their puny voices in his sonorities...

...In almost every subsequent generation, various schools of Western poets have latched on to Li Po, composing sparse lines evoking wet leaves, chirping crickets and distant mountains...

...As an added treat, their exchanges read like a gripping epistolary novel, dramatizing the trajectories of their troubled lives and brilliant careers against the backdrop of revolution in Brazil, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and the United States’ involvement in Vietnam...

...Shortly after meeting Lowell, she described herself as “the loneliest person who ever lived...

...In "Home Again Among Fields and Gardens," T'ao Ch'ien (356-427 CE...

...I couldn't bear to have my book (my life) wait inside me like a dead child...

...I predict that when the dust settles, and Bishop and Lowell seem as distant in time from us as Emily Dickinson or Robert Browning, they will be read side by side, continuing the dialogue they pursued throughout their lives...

...Lowell’s frequent recreation of his style and rhetoric captured wide attention...

...to the present, though Hinton's volume only takes us through the 12th century of the Common Era...

...She felt it degrading that she should inspire rather than be inspired...

...Elizabeth, who never saw her again, was passed around among relatives...

...In a late sonnet, he called her an "unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect...

...Bishop resignedly comfortedhim: "We all have irreparable and awful actions on our consciences...

...Only after the predictable firestorm from the press and furious demands from a wounded Hardwick in their divorce proceedings did he concede, "My sin (mistake...

...Bishop was an orphan...

...POETS periodically refresh tired conventions by studying the art of another culture, then absorbing it into their own...

...Bishop's life, though, was no less troubled than Lowell's...

...Her method has limitations, a by-product of her perfectionism...

...was publishing...