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The Boston Globe

Theater & art

Stage Review

In ‘Dear Elizabeth,’ poets forge bond beyond words

NEW HAVEN — In one of his letters to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams famously declared: “You and I ought not to die, before we have explained ourselves to each other.’’

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop seemed to feel a similar urgency, although poets are perhaps more likely than statesmen to understand that the job of self-explication is never really done.

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