Influenced both by Bishop’s conversational tone and, as Jamison points out, by his therapist’s urgings to explore his childhood, Lowell shifted register in Life Studies. The volume traces an arc from formal historical poems to autobiographical free verse describing his hospitalizations, the strains that manic depression placed on his marriage, and his shame—offering up what the critic M. L. Rosenthal dubbed “the most naked kind of confession,” a form of “soul’s therapy.” The revelations were his, but the emotional clarity seems learned from Bishop. “I myself am hell,” Lowell proclaimed in what is arguably his most famous poem, “Skunk Hour,” a masterful lyric whose off-kilter lines and insistent repetitions of -ll sounds mimic emotional destabilization. After the publication of Life Studies, Sylvia Plath declared herself “very excited” by “this intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience which I feel has been partly taboo.”

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Bishop, too, thought that suffering was crucial to the insights of poetry: “Nobody’s heart is really good for much until it has been smashed to little bits,” she once wrote. But unlike Lowell, she was averse to intimate exposure, Marshall observes. As she wrestled with autobiographical matter that threatened to overwhelm her—her mother’s insanity, the suicide of her long-term partner Lota de Macedo Soares—she kept a disciplined aesthetic distance, striving at the same time for emotional lucidity. Bishop believed that poetry derived power from reticence (she once referred to “disasters, etc.” in a letter to a lover). Interviewed about Lowell and the confessional movement by Time magazine in 1967, she tried to justify confessional poetry’s blunt approach to traumatic revelation, noting that in a sense, “the worst moments of horrible and terrifying lives are an allegory of the world.” But, as Marshall notes, she couldn’t help adding that “the tendency is to overdo the morbidity. You just wish they’d keep some of these things to themselves.”

Bishop’s poems are saturated with personal tragedy, but for her a poem isn’t so much a vehicle for personal expression as it is an object that can dramatically enact loss, through the use of irony and understatement. In “Sestina,” she writes in the third person about a girl drawing a series of “rigid” and “inscrutable” houses as her grandmother looks on. As the poem progresses through its demanding formal twists (a sestina repeats a prescribed series of end words six times), the absence of parents in the domestic tableau becomes glaringly obvious—even if the poem never says as much. “Crusoe in England,” one of Bishop’s most poignant poems, is a dramatic monologue, spoken not by the poet but by Robinson Crusoe on returning home to England. It was finished after Lota died, which, Marshall notes, was nearly 17 years into their relationship:

The local museum’s asked me to

leave everything to them:

the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes,

my shedding goatskin trousers …

How can anyone want such things?

—And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles

seventeen years ago come March.

Bishop and Lowell are ideal vehicles for biographers hoping to examine the interplay between creativity and suffering. But Marshall succumbs to the temptation to overplay the one-to-one correlation between events in Bishop’s life and her work, quoting poems almost as if they were journals or letters. The question she too often skirts is how a particular wounding event became a poem. The answer lies in the tortured hours Bishop spent not writing and then, once she finally got started, drafting and redrafting until a poem found the virtuosic form that would contain its urgent emotions. Given how fully realized and restrained her published poems are, readers were shocked to discover the rawness of many of her early drafts and unpublished poems, versions of which were gathered in Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (2006).

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Jamison blurs the artistic process too. She fascinatingly suggests that Lowell’s many radical stylistic swerves were connected to his manic breakdowns. That there is a deep relationship between his “elated” states and his literary aspiration seems true. But as richly nuanced as Jamison’s book is, her medical lens by definition leaves some crucial questions unexplored. “I write my best poetry when I’m manic,” Lowell once noted, a declaration she takes seriously. But he also spoke about having to edit what he wrote when manic. One wonders in what ways Lowell’s poetic ambition (a therapist observed that he had “an undue preoccupation with greatness”) was powered by forces other than his mania. Jamison cites studies that show poets are more likely to be bipolar than the rest of us. Yet she leaves the reader to puzzle over why. Does poetry’s compression and intensity draw such minds? Or does the high value that poetry places on figurative language provide the allure, since it dovetails with the tendency of manic people’s speech to display what Jamison describes as “flight of ideas”?