Letters

‘When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.’ ‘When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.’ This is the conclusion of Kipling’s harrowing story of child abuse, ‘Baa-Baa Black Sheep’, and it reminds us that the Victorians knew all that one can know, or need to know, about the misery that may be inflicted on children. They also knew where best to deploy that knowledge: in a fictional narrative. No biographer has ever doubted that this story came from Kipling’s own painful experience as a child.

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton Why does this book need to exist? It’s a legitimate question — the correspondence of both these poets has been published in generous selected editions — but an easy one to answer. Quite apart from the fact you’d need prehensile thumbs to follow their exchanges properly through those two fat volumes, the unexpurgated version gives you not only ease but texture: their ‘helter-skelter shop-talk’; gossip about Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore and Randall Jarrell; Lowell ‘exhaustingly’ changing his typewriter ribbons; Bishop getting ‘some of a very old & liquefied jelly bean’ stuck to her letter.