‘You Can’t Derange, or Re-arrange, Your Poems Again’ : ONE ART: Letters, <i> By Elizabeth Bishop Selected and edited by Robert Giroux (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $35; 668 pp.)</i>

“If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so, I’m sure it’s a good one,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell. Yesterday, about to review her letters, I read through Bishop’s collected poems. Today, the world is still caught in a quick-change of guises: from the great fish with five hooks in its lip, “a five-haired beard of wisdom”; to “the frail, illegal fire balloons” rising above the Brazilian hilltop where she spent a dozen years; to the love she shared with Lowell, not erotic but carnal as the bond between twins, along with a tumultuous joint tenancy in the Maine coast and the comradeship of poetry. These she evoked after his death:

You left North Haven, anchored in

its rock

afloat in mystic blue . . . And now --

you’ve left

for good. You can’t derange, or

re-arrange,

your poems again. (But the Sparrows

can their song.)

The words won’t change again. Sad

friend, you cannot change.

After her own death in 1979, Bishop has increasingly come to be seen, along with Lowell, as one of the two greatest poets of the generation that followed Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. It is possible though not really interesting to think that she may come to outrank him. A poem is a trumpet or a lantern; his sounded more compellingly, hers illuminated more.

There were few peaceful lives in their cohort. Lowell’s storms of mania are well known; so are the suicides of John Berryman and Theodore Roethke. Bishop’s life was less publicly desperate. But the more than 500 letters selected out of several thousand by Robert Giroux, her longtime editor and friend, tell of fragility, tormented self-questioning, bouts of alcoholic oblivion, and a near-breakdown or two.

There were several lesbian love affairs that the letters only indirectly touch upon. They give a full account--though sex is never mentioned--of the 15 years she lived in Brazil with her lover, Lota Macedo Soares, a distinguished feminist and public figure. They were the happiest years of her life but they ended with Lota’s suicide and recriminations from family and friends who blamed Bishop for it.

Countering these darknesses were a frail but redoubtable endurance and a stubborn moral sense--drawn in part, perhaps, from her Nova Scotia childhood. There was also playful humor, a gift for friendship, food and outings, a lyrical instinct for the shape of others’ lives, and faith in the discipline of beauty instilled by her early mentor, Marianne Moore. All these qualities of light are the sinews of Bishop’s poetry; they make it humane and enticingly readable despite its uncompromising aesthetic. The darkness is there but--more than with most of her fellow confessional poets--stoically restrained.

The letters move in bands of light and darkness. In the early 1930s, her bright literary years at Vassar, they have a conquer-the-world feeling. There is a comic and revealing exchange with a stuffy (at the time) young Harvard poet, Donald Stanford, who told her that her sensibility was not suitable for a woman. He followed up with a poem about lust, veiled in neo-Edwardian euphemism.

She nailed him on “charms.” “My God, how loathsome an expression that is. It represents surely one of the worst sides of masculinity--to sum up three or four more exciting features of female anatomy and label them all with one convenient word.” There seems, nevertheless, to have been a faint spark going--her sexual orientation may still have been cloudy--until they met. Stanford was “sweet but very young,” she wrote a friend, and her letters immediately turned polite and stopped.

Early on, she speaks of a poetry that moves to touch and agitate its subjects, even at the cost of roughness. Wallace Stevens’ blank verse may “moo” but she likes that “it is such a display of ideas at work making poetry, the poetry making them. . . .” In the apprenticeship with Marianne Moore that followed Bishop’s timid invitation to the circus, she marks her growing independence by occasionally taking issue with Moore’s suggestions for avoiding awkwardness.

There is no question, though, of her reverence for the older poet, or the great deal Moore taught her of how to be precise in extravagance, and of the fine angular wonders to be found in the world of plants and animals. She writes with awe of the pains Moore would take with a poem; years later it would take Bishop 16 years to complete her own golden “The Moose.” Lowell wrote: “Do/you still hang your words in air, ten years/unfinished, glued to your noticeboard, with gaps/or empties for the unimaginable phrase?”

Her correspondence with Lowell began around the time her first book, “North & South” was published in 1945, and continued until his death. Much of it is about poetry, and richly rewarding--Moore, her mentor, gave way to Lowell, her fellow warrior--but there is an underlying confidence and intimacy that seems to grow richer as time passes. The relationship had its strains. At one point Lowell thought he was in love with her; a fluttering that Bishop was at pains to ignore though it probably caused her stress.

Bishop went through a dark few years after the publication of “North & South.” Her letters mention alcoholic benders and her difficulty in controlling herself. A stint at the writers’ colony at Yaddo is a nightmare. She is agonizingly shy, gets no writing done, spends her time blowing soap bubbles on her balcony and complains that the place smells “of old lunchboxes.” Her year as poetry consultant for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington was equally painful.

After a casual trip to Brazil and her meeting with Lota, her letters change like bare trees flowering. The couple moves to Lota’s estate in the mountains and Bishop finds, in the Brazilian’s love and protection, the confidence to be happy and to open up her poetry to a new world. First with Moore, later with Lota and finally with Alice Methfessel--now her executor--Bishop looked for someone not so much to protect her life as to vouch for it. She couldn’t do it for herself; all her vouching went into her poetry. She vouched for the things she wrote about.

In the last years with Lota, Bishop’s letters speak of a protectiveness that became confining and dictatorial. In poor health and under stress, Lota became violently critical; eventually she suffered a breakdown. Doctors advised a separation, and Bishop traveled to New York; Lota followed. On their first night together, Lota went to another room and took a fatal overdose of Valium. Her family accused Bishop of causing the suicide and kept up an unremitting hostility when she returned to Brazil to settle her affairs.

The letters are detailed and agonizing. A second agony came when Bishop entered a relationship with a young woman who suffered a schizophrenic breakdown when they moved to a house Bishop owned in Ouro Preto. A move to Harvard, where she met Methfessel--who comes across as a kind of angel of helpfulness and balance--provided a certain serenity for her last years, despite bad health, money worries and a sense of being used up. The last letters, if not happy, have a stoic grace and wit to them.

The collection is a treasure. It is also an undeveloped treasure and, to some degree, a wasted one. Giroux, who took over the editing after the original editor died, has made a fine selection. He has written a perceptive and illuminating foreword. But he has left the body of the correspondence virtually without notes.

All kinds of allusions and gaps are left unexplained and unilluminated. Almost never do we get an idea--except to the degree that Bishop herself suggests one--of what she is responding to. We have to piece together for ourselves the details of her alcoholic collapses. When Harcourt Brace writes a cool response to her first collection we want to know what it is. How did her years in Key West turn sour, as they evidently did, in the early 1940s? Why is there a 10-month gap in 1943? An allusion to trouble with Marianne Moore goes unelaborated.

Time and again we need a clue from the editor--or even an “I don’t know”--and don’t get it. Ideally, the reader of a published letter should know about as much as the recipient does. Often this is not possible but in this case--had greater pains been taken--quite often it would have been.