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 "nice" we were. V. Woolf, K.A.P. [Katherine Anne Porter], Bowen, R. West, etc-- they are all full of it. They have to make quite sure that the reader is not going to misplace them socially, first-- and that nervousness interferes constantly with what they think they'd like to say.
--Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) in a letter to Robert Lowell, 1959. Quoted in a review by Colm Tóibín of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton (2008). London Review of Books, 14 May 2009.
Comments