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“... poet – and it ought to frustrate his readers – when he gets recognised for the wrong things. Frank Bidart first became famous in America (famous, that is, as American poets go) for the grisly violence of his dramatic monologues, for his poems’ unusual layout and typography, and for his close association with older poets, especially with Robert ...”

“... him, the earlier Tuscan and Sicilian love poets. ‘A ciascun’alma presa’ was translated by Frank Bidart in 1997 with an immediacy that captures Dante’s summons to follow him along Love’s path:To all those driven berserk or humanised by lovethis is offered, for I need helpdeciphering my dream.When we love our lord is LOVE.For Dante’s ...”

“... at us: ‘Thoreau/snow’, ‘Victorians/Emersonian’, ‘productivity/something dirty’, ‘Frank Bidart/questions in art’. Three Poems has an aerated extravagance that brings to mind Wallace Stevens’s ‘Parfait Martinique: coffee mousse, rum on top, a little cream on top of that’ – though that sounds positively austere beside these ...”

“... its incorporation of stray materials, the personal touch on the elbow that the American poet Frank Bidart, a close friend and associate of Lowell’s, ‘both amanuensis and sounding-board’ for the many books of sonnets, has brought to it. (A no doubt garbled account once reached me of Lowell flying ...”

“... In fact, in 1978, the year after Lowell’s death, Blackwood posted them to Lowell’s friend Frank Bidart in Boston. Bidart, Saskia Hamilton writes, ‘put the envelope under his bed, and later transferred it to the Houghton Library in Harvard, with a cover note stating that “This packet of letters belongs to ...”

“... that Chester Kallman is being prepared for reincarnation as a future black leader in South Africa. Frank Bidart’s The Book of the Body elicits the voyeur in us. Such fascination as it has is that of the case-study in abnormality, and no one confident of his poetic style would find room for Jerome Kern words like ‘suddenly’ and ‘somehow’, nor ...”

“... sorting out a large number of poems into appropriate volumes had been undertaken with the help of Frank Bidart, and those that went into The Dolphin were personal, including not only references to Elizabeth Hardwick, but embarrassing quotations from her letters and phone calls. Lowell made no attempt to get her permission to use this material – it ...”

“... of 1935, when he was 18, Robert Lowell and two friends from St Mark’s School – Blair Clark and Frank Parker – rented a house in Nantucket. Under Lowell’s direction, they studied the Bible (with special attention to the Book of Job) and ate cereal with raw honey and ‘badly’ cooked eels. Lowell decided that Clark should quit smoking and, when Clark ...”

“... to her sense of what poetry could be: a reaching of one’s limits, and a release into the wild. Frank Bidart once told her how great the poem’s closing lines were, and recalled her response: ‘She said that when she was writing it she hardly knew what she was writing, knew the words were right, and (at this she raised her arms as high straight above ...”

“... than something to be envied; in the heyday of ‘lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals’ (Frank O’Hara), the New Yorker was not viewed as a particularly serious publisher of poetry. Appearing there did nothing to contradict Bishop’s self-stylisation as a ‘poet by default’: ‘I’ve always felt that I’ve written poetry more by not writing it ...”

“... of old friends from far places’ who visited him towards the end. That was who he was. The poet Frank Bidart, one of his older friends, is quoted near the end of Hammer’s book: ‘He was infinitely accomplished, preternaturally gifted – the greatest rhymer since Pope – capable of doing anything on the page, with a divine assemblage of sound and ...”

“... up into the air’, lifts them ‘lightly’, ‘five flights up’. Bishop once told the poet Frank Bidart that as she wrote the closing lines of ‘At the Fishhouses’ she felt ‘ten feet tall’, raising her hands as high as they would go above her head to perform her sense of elevation. Like Penelope Gwin’s blue balloon, the bird of ‘Five ...”

“... Lowell made changes to the book as a result of this letter, but he left the sections quoted above. Frank Bidart wrote in his notes to the poems: ‘Lowell responded by fundamentally changing the book. Several of the poems in Hardwick’s voice were muted by taking them out of direct quotation, placed in italics, their anguish and anger softened.’ Lowell ...”