Sometimes it seems … as though only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love & only stupid people are intelligent enough to let themselves be loved.

—Elizabeth Bishop, from her notebook

Dream—

I see a postman everywhere

Vanishing in thin blue air,

A mammoth letter in his hand,

Postmarked from a foreign land.

The postman’s uniform is blue.

The letter is of course from you

And I’d be able to read, I hope,

My own name on the envelope

But he has trouble with this letter

Which constantly grows bigger & bigger

And over and over with a stare,

He vanishes in blue, blue air.

—Elizabeth Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments

Elizabeth told me about Robert Lowell. She said, “He’s my best friend.” When I met him a few years later, I mentioned that I knew her and he said, “Oh, she’s my best friend.” It was nice to think that she and Lowell both thought of each other in the same way.

—Thom Gunn, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop

I can remember Cal’s carrying Elizabeth’s “Armadillo” poem around in his wallet everywhere, not the way you’d carry the picture of a grandson, but as you’d carry something to brace you and make you sure of how a poem ought to be.

—Richard Wilbur, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop

While we were with her, she managed to finish “North Haven,” the poem [or elegy] for Lowell. She read it to us and walked about with it in her hand. I found it very moving that she felt she could hardly bear to put it down, that it was part of her. She put it beside her plate at dinner.

—Ilse Barker, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop