Bishop's Want of Truth

The facts of life at times are the most simplified complications we have in life and in writing. When we read a good book it is often determined to be good as it is not real and the situations found within are romantic and unrealistic that their illusions draw us in. Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell both poets and writers had often exchanged their writings with each other in a bond of friendship. In this particular instance Bishop is writing a letter to Lowell explaining distaste for Lowell’s latest book as it alludes and professes many truths and sub truths that Bishop feels to be unnecessary. Lowell had just written a book called The Dolphins which included a number of poems about Lowell and a love for which he had for a Caroline Blackwood. Included in the book were letters which he had received from Lowell’s second wife Elizabeth Hardwick. The problem that Bishop had was the she felt that Lowell had portrayed the stories and situations a bit off and that is was a violation of trust and mixed fact.
As Bishop and Lowell had a bonded over the years and sharing much of their personal literary works with each other I’m sure there would have not many else who have been able to talk some sense of in the very least offer some satisfactory criticism to Lowell and his new published book. It can be seen the friendship that they shared as Bishop explains to Lowell, “If you were any other poet I can think of I certainly wouldn’t attempt to say anything at all; I wouldn’t think it was worth it. But because it is you, and a great poem ( I’ve never used the word “great” before, that I remember) . and I love you a lot – I feel I must tell you what I really think.” In this explanation Bishop is explaining to Lowell the reasons why she is writing the letter and it also shows the great friendship as Bishop goes as far as suggesting her love for him in writing this letter for him. Bishop goes on to explain to Lowell that this book he has written will be something that he may regret in the future and one that she herself does not want to have him regret.
Essentially Bishop is trying to her help her friend not to use this book. Bishop’s emotions about this book can be summed up in this line from her letter which reads, “In general, I deplore the confessional – however , when you wrote Life Studies perhaps it was a necessary movement, and it helped make poetry more real, fresh and immediate. But now – ye god – anything goes, and I am sick of poems about the students’ mothers and fathers and sex lives and so on. All that can be done – but at the same time one surely should have a feeling that one can trust the writer – not to distort, tell lies, et.” It seems that in many ways Bishop is fed up with everything that is made up. She doesn’t the lies that more often are written in literature, but the truth to be told. In many ways Bishop is compelling her friend, Lowell, to be better than the rest and stay true to himself.

From Past to Present

For most writers and authors the plight for explanation and futher understanding of other and self can be a daunting task. T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” implores the ideas and concepts of writers and their traditions or talents. For everyone the expression that surfaces in their writing is a representation of our personal tradition and talents.
Eliot delves in to other’s writings and how it is they come to express themselves within the confines of their writings. “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” As Eliot sees things the way in which a writer represents himself is based upon other writers and how their respective writings have reflected upon them.

We are all in many ways influenced by others whether we like it or not. “I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has every been written.” Eliot derived a lot of the meaning he found in all forms of writing based upon how it came to be. Eliot describes in this case how poems as they are related to other poems and how that relation essentially makes or breaks them. Writing like many things in life comes from a long line of antecessors who have affected the way we write even today. Eliot essentially claims that writings of many different forms are; only because the once were. We as humans use writings of the past to help change the way in which we write in the now, and as we look towards the future.