A CRITICAL STUDY OF. ELIZABETH BISHOP’S POETRY Diana E. WyI I ie A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the reqùirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY December 1977 BOWLING GREEN UN1V. LIBRARY ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like To thank Douglas Fricke for his guidance throughout each step of this dissertation. With the other members of the committee, he offered suggestions and recom­ mendations on the various drafts, and his advice was invalu­ able. I also appreciate the help and support of Robert B. Meyers and Barbara Fialkowski McMillen who, at differing points in this study, guided me to sources which have proved helpful in the writing of the dissertation. Special thanks to Judith Dunaway for her help with typing and proofreading and to Rebecca Peters for typing the final copy. I am especially grateful to Elizabeth Bishop for her hospitality in meeting with me.in April, 1976, and sharing her thoughts and comments on her poetry and that of many of her contemporaries. * I • III ABSTRACT Studies of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry (which is primarily descriptive or pictorial in nature) have traditionaI Iy omitted any serious consideration of the poet's use of the speaker, or narrator, whose presence is the shaping force of the poems. The purpose of this study of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry is to propose a critical approach to her poetry that, through con­ centrating on the speaking voice in the poems, will allow for a better understanding of the poems. This study focuses on the speaker's presence as evidenced in the descriptions through her tone of voice and word choice. In the analysis of the poems, divided into poems of places, objects, and characters, close attention is spent on how the speaker reveals not only the subject of the poem but also her relationship to that subject. Once Bishop’s poetry is studied by this approach, it is possible to recognize clearly the elements of modern American poetry that have significantly influenced her work. It is also possible to understand how, since she remains outside the main­ stream of contemporary American poetry, she has greatly influenced contemporary poets from a variety of "schools" of poetry. f f.) f ! ' f /3 7<77 IV TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER 1 Introduction and Plan for the 1 Analysis of the Poems CHAPTER 2 "Should we have stayed at home?"’ 19 Analysis of the Poems of Place CHAPTER 3 "It is the monument" 47 Analysis of the Poems of Objects CHAPTER 4 "You are one of them" 82 Analysis of the Poems of Characters CHAPTER 5 Elizabeth Bishop and Twentieth- 124 Century Poetry: A Conclusion BIBLIOGRAPHY 147 I Chapter 1: Introduction and Plan for the Critical Analysis of the Poems Randall Jarrell once said of Elizabeth Bishop that "the more you read her poems, the better and fresher, the more nearly perfect they seem."' In an interview given in 1961, Theodore Roethke named W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Bishop as the poets he greatly admired—"the latter 2 for her 'wonderful eye.'" John Berryman considered Bishop "our best lyricist since Emily Dickinson"^ and Robert Lowell repeatedly expressed 4 his indebtedness to Bishop's poetry. When nominating Elizabeth Bishop for the Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature (which she won in February, 1976), John Ashbery described her as "a writer's writer’s writer" who has inspired all sorts of writers "from a whole generation of young experimental poets to experimenters of a different sort and perhaps a steadier eye, such as Robert Duncan and James Tate, and to poet-critics of undeniable authority like Marianne 5 Moore, Randall Jarrell, Richard Wilbur and Robert Lowell." In spite of this praise by other poets, most critical studies of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry have relegated her work to the rank of clever, though limited, minor poetry. In the Handbook to Contemporary Poetry, Karl Malkoff suggests that readers be wary of ranking her this way and claims to recognize in Bishop's poetry a quality that will outlast the more celebrated and generally acknowledged major •poets of this century. Although there has been a surge of both critical and popular interest in her poetry since the recent publica­ tion of Geography I I I (1976), the consensus of those who have written 2 critical studies of her poetry is that Elizabeth Bishop writes primarily visual or pictorial poetry which describes, with accuracy and precision, the surfaces of the natural, physical world. Bishop herself supports this reading: she expressed pleasure on hearing that an art critic had described her work as words used with a painter’s eye for detail and landscape. While it is not inaccurate to see Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry as essentially descriptive and visual poetry, most of the critics have mistakenly placed their emphasis on what it is she is describing and how closely it is related to her life or geographic subjects instead of how she is describing through not only the formal structure of the poems but also the tone, attitude and sense of the poet’s voice. -This dissertation will propose a method for approaching Bishop's poetry that, by shifting the emphasis to the speaker and her percep­ tions of the scene, will enable the reader to respond to the poem as it is revealed by this speaker rather than simply to respond to the specifics of the description. By concentrating on the speaker’s rela­ tionship to her subject, the reader can recognize in Bishop’s poetry a deeper involvement between the speaker and the subject than has been previously noted. Bishop will be studied not as a charming poet who sees and describes prettily visual surfaces but as an intense observer who reveals the exotic as well as the commonplace realities of her landscapes in a conversational tone that often seems to understate the significance of the revelations as they are made. That Bishop writes descriptive or pictorial poetry is evident 3 through even a cursory reading of her poems. Her places are depicted as landscapes easily translatable into visual art, and she seems to direct the reader carefully through a step by step visualization of a specific object (as in "The Monument" in which each angle of this object is noted in an attempt to see it clearly and completely) or of a place (as in "Florida" or "Cape Breton"). Bishop uses such precise language in her descriptions that the reader soon feels that he is able to see quite literally and clearly what it is the words describe. But it is in their seeing only this surface object or landscape that Bishop's critics have failed. They accept a poetic description of a place to be realistic and forget that the poet has obviously selected and ordered the words to create a fictional¡zed, rather than real, world. Through the use of detailed description, Bishop, as do most landscape poets, creates the illusion that she is either referring to a world outside the poem which she shares with the reader or is creating g a new world which the reader can accept. If the reader is mindful of the description in the poem as a part of its fictionalized world, he will recognize these details as providing the illusion of reality rather than an expression of a literal reality outside the poem. How-' ever, in their.study of Bishop's poetry her critics never seem to question the relationship between reality and the descriptions but vigorously assert that they are identical. It seems enough for them to say, with JarrelI, "all. her poems have written underneath, I have . , „9 seen it." When reading the descriptive poem, we accept the authority of the 4 poet whose voice supplies us with descriptions of places and do not question the details of the scene described. We accept place names, the precision of details and, as they accumulate, will nod and say "ah yes, that is how it looks" whether we have ever seen what is described or not. Proper nouns and specific details have this effect on us and often seem to be all that is necessary in securing a reader’s accep­ tance of the speaker's authority. Whether these details are in fact true to the subject is rarely important to our understanding of the descriptive poem, for while we must accept the specific elements as accurate descriptions of the subject of the poem, how well they refer to a reality outside the poem is not pertinent to the reading of the poem. Since the reader is usually unable to verify the accuracy of the descriptive referents in the poem, he will accept the descriptive details as a convention of pictorial poetry and will not demand bio­ graphical or geographical realism from it. Therefore, it is not necessary, as Elizabeth Bishop's critics seem to think, to go outside of her poems to find that, indeed, Elizabeth Bishop "Arrived at Santos," lived in Brazil, in Nova Scotia, in Florida, has been to these places and.met the people her poems describe. While it would be foolish to ignore the biographical and historical elements in any study of Bishop's poetry (her experiences in the places to which she has traveled clearly form a starting point in many of her poems), it is important to understand that the authority of her descriptive •poems does not reside in their biographical accuracy but -in the speaker's insistence that the descriptions seem to be honest. 5 In reading a descriptive poem, it is particularly important for us to recognize how we are reacting to the speaker because our reac­ tions to the scene are based partly on our often unconscious response to the attitudes expressed by the speaker.