More on the letters of poets

...appears in The Guardian in Andrew Motion's review of The Letters of Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton. Two sentences regarding Lowell's letters "to and about other poets" struck me. Motion says that "once his career is launched, this zeal deepens as he draws round him (or at least develops contact with) the strong poets of his own age." And this: "but where a smaller heart might have allowed the whole business to slide into mere neurosis about the pecking order, Lowell embraces the richness of his surrounding talents as a spur."