“In 1974, Elizabeth Bishop seemed to have all the things a poet could want: a teaching position at Harvard, a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a first-look contract with The New Yorker, which almost always decided to publish her work. And yet she was inconsolably unhappy. ‘When you write my epitaph,’ Bishop said to the poet Robert Lowell, ‘you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.'”