News at Eleven: [Elizabeth Bishop] didn't require any reading

at all except for the two-volume memoir by Nadezhda Mandelstam, the wife of Osip Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. She said that she wanted us to know that there are people who have died for poetry. I was very interested in that choice, given that Bishop was not a political poet. She encouraged us to read a lot of other things, but that was the only reading she required. She said it was very important to read Keats's letters--that in some ways Keats's letters were even better than his poems, and I remember that I did read Keats's letters that year. [--Mary Jo Salter]

from The Atlantic: The Poet's Poet

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