Do you remember how at the end of that long swimming and sunning Stonington day, we were talking about this and that about ourselves and you said, rather humorously yet it was truly meant, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.” ... I assumed that it would be just a matter of time before I proposed and I half believed that you would accept. Yet I wanted it all to have the right build-up. Well, I didn’t say anything then. And then there was that poetry conference at Bard and I remember one evening presided over by Mary McCarthy and my Elizabeth was there, and going home to the Bard poets’ dormitory, I was so drunk that my hands turned cold and I felt half-dying and held your hand. And nothing was said, and like a loon that needs sixty feet, I believe, to take off from the water, I wanted time and space, and went on assuming ... Yet there were a few months. I suppose we might almost claim something like apparently Strachey and Virginia Woolf. And of course there was always the other side, the fact that our friendship really wasn’t a courting, was really disinterested (Bad phrase) really led to no encroachments. So it is. Let me say this though and then leave the matter forever: I do think free will is sewn into everything we do; you can’t cross a street, light a cigarette, drop saccharine in your coffee without really doing it. Yet the possible alternatives that life allows us are very few, often there must be none. I’ve never thought there was any choice for me about writing poetry. No doubt if I used my head better, ordered my life better, worked harder etc. the poetry would be improved, and there must be many lost poems, innumerable accidents and ill-done actions. But asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had.
Robert Lowell in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, August 15th 1957