Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell The publication in 2008 of Words in Air: The Collected Correspondence of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop offers the reader a privileged glimpse into the long and emotional friendship between two major postwar American poets, who were each an active influence on the other's work. Bishop would enclose a poem in a 1961 letter to Lowell, claiming the draft "undoubtedly shows your influence" but also noting

The convoluted relationships that characterize much of the novel are an example of a madding crowd, not distance from it. Also, Hardy describes how industrialization and urbanization are changing rural life at a pace at which they may be beginning to converge. The madding crowd is infiltrating the peaceful pastoral landscapes, while the people of the fields are finding it harder and harder to find employment practicing their traditional ways

headline from May 2015. "Picasso's Women of Algiers Smashes Auction Record," is how the BBC phrased it, on May 12, noting that "Picasso's Women of Algiers has become the most expensive painting to sell at auction, going for $160 million" (Gompertz 2015). In the frequently dicey and volatile early twenty-first century economy, it is clear that high art has managed to maintain its value in a way that the

Religion was an important preoccupation for 18th century poets, and Christian symbolism, imagery, diction, and themes make their way into the poetry of this era. In many situations, the references to religion are as overt as a painting of Christ. Many poems dealing with religious imagery, themes, and iconography also deal with existential issues and in particular, death and mortality. For example, in "The Dying Christian to his Soul," Alexander

This poem is also about someone close to the poet who has passed, but instead of juxtaposing presence and absence as Levine did, Amichai instead contrasts terror and joy, youth and death, and violence and peace. The first opposition is built in the first stanza, where the poet points out the reversal of age and wisdom brought about by Dicky's early death. Before he died, Dicky was "four years older

" And had Bucke never read any of Whitman's earlier poetry (Leaves of Grass, for example) "we might think that words could not convey greater passion" than they did in Drum-Taps (p. 171). "But now we know better," he went on. The "splendid faith" of Whitman's earlier poems is "greatly dimmed" in Drum-Taps, he insists. Bucke writes that he was told by a person "who knew the poet well, and who