Robert Lowell

When Lowell wrote to Bishop he was, for once, not involved in an act of performance. When Bishop wrote to Lowell she knew that she was reading his poems more deeply, and with more responsible attention, than any other friend would ever dare to do. --The Economist, Serious engagement, November 20, 2008, review of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton

Their surviving 459 letters, some surprisingly long (Bishop might elaborate hers over weeks, at times swearing she had written Lowell in her imagination), give us the closest view of these wounded creatures — his muscular, bull-in-a-china-shop intellect; her pained shyness and abject modesty, and a gaze like the gleam off a knife. --William Logan, ‘I Write Entirely for You’, The New York Times, October 31, 2008, review of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton

Dear Elizabeth, by Robert Lowell: One poet writes to another, The New Yorker, December 20 and 27, 2004

His Own Prophet, review by Michael Hofmann of Collected Poems by Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, London Review of Books, September 11, 2003

The achievement of Robert Lowell, by Richard Tillinghast, The New Criterion, January 2003