The series of letters Bishop wrote to her psychoanalyst detail her sexual history and its connections to her creativity in an extended reverie, probably written at the suggestion of Dr. Foster as part of Bishop’s treatment. Although unpublished, by now they have been discussed in essays and academic papers. Bishop wrote them on a typewriter, filling to the margins more than nineteen sheets of paper and another two pages or so of personal chronology. Begun under the influence of three quarts of whiskey, as she confesses, the letters relate dreams, certain visionary experiences, anxieties, anecdotes, childhood memories, desires, pleasures, sexual habits, ideas for poems, and, above all, Bishop’s loving devotion to and personal trust in her psychoanalyst.
Source : Letters: Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Art Form or Something’
