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"They had the kind of love that transcends space, time, and the body," playwright Sarah Ruhl says. "I found that very moving."

Ruhl is talking about poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, whose 30-year correspondence and friendship is the subject of Ruhl's new play, Dear Elizabeth, at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven. Her play's text consists of letters the poets exchanged from 1947 to 1977, when Lowell died. Mary Beth Fisher portrays Bishop and Jefferson Mays — a Best-Actor Tony Award winner in 2004 for I Am My Own Wife (2004) — is Lowell. Les Waters directs.

Bishop was a lesbian; Lowell was divorcing the writer Jean Stafford when he and Bishop met, and went on to marry writers Elizabeth Hardwick and Caroline Blackwood. He was manic-depressive, and later would often be hospitalized.

They met at a dinner party in 1947 — she was 36, he 30. They became two of the most renowned and respected 20th-century American poets — he won two Pulitzer Prizes (the first in 1947), she one. They helped each other with their poetry; he considered her the finest contemporary American poet and promoted her career.

Their relationship continued even though — or perhaps because — they rarely saw each other. The letters came from Maine, Key West, London, Brazil.

"I was so moved by the idea of two lives recorded in letters," Ruhl says, "partly because we're in the digital age, where the idea of recording our lives in minute detail in letters is so foreign. And partly because these two individuals were so extraordinary."