From: Elizabeth Bishop – A Miracle for Breakfast (2017), by Megan Marshall:
“Despite urging each other on, neither Cal (Robert Lowell (1917 – 1977)) nor Elizabeth continued their autobiographical projects in prose for publication. Still, the twin accounts broke ground for future poems and drew on the poets’ shared experience of psychoanalysis. Like Elizabeth, and for equally pressing reasons, Cal had begun “psycho-therapy” in the late 1940s, a process he found “rather amazing – something like stirring up the bottom of an aquarium – chunks of the past coming up at unfamiliar angles, distinct and then indistinct.” Those chunks of remembered feeling and incident served as material for “91 Revere Street” and much to follow. His aquatic analogy recalled Elizabeth’s 1947 “At the Fishhouses,” the poem she’d written near the end of her treatment, in which the icy ocean water, a revelation of “what we imagine knowledge to be” – knowledge of the self gained through psychoanalysis, she’d explained to Ruth Foster – is “dark deep and absolutely clear,” qualities that could also describe the poem itself and Elizabeth’s aims as a poet.”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52192/at-the-fishhouses
Julia Upton 