Another Elizabeth Bishop bit: William Logan in the NY Times on the correspondence between Bishop and Robert Lowell: “Lowell always seems to be stuffing her newest poem into his billfold, so he can take it out later like a hundred-dollar bill.” (?)

Another James Agee bit: Again from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: “Most young writers and artists roll around in description like honeymooners on a bed.” *

* Agee was twenty-six or twenty-seven when he wrote this. Also, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is one of the most densely descriptive books I’ve ever read. (A few sentences later, he writes: “But again I suspect that the lust for describing, and that lust in action, is not necessarily a vice.”) Also, is his simile supposed to be negative?