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Article: Critics and connoisseurs. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
- Article from:
- Harper's Magazine
- Article date:
- October 1, 2002
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Harper's Magazine Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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I greatly enjoyed Cristina Nehring's article on Edna St. Vincent Millay ["Last the Night," Reviews, July]. I have been pleased to see the recent turnaround in critical appraisals of Millay's work, because I teach her, alongside Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore. Nehring, however, mentions the latter two poets in a way that is misleading. Bishop's work is highly musical--much more so than the work of a number of her "modernist" contemporaries, such as Robert Lowell. It is true that Bishop did not turn out to be a sonneteer, as Millay was. Yet to represent Bishop's style with one stanza from a poem that is deliberately--and unusually, for ...