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. To understand the descrip­ tive poem it is necessary not only to see the visual description or know the structure of the descriptive language but also to recognize that both are filtered through an observer whose perceptions change the meanings of the details to become more than referents could indi­ cate. The accumulation of descriptive details, the specific references to the places and the people through proper nouns, the use of metaphors to bring within the reader’s ken what might be foreign in the descrip­ tion are all elements which establish the authority of the speaker in the description.

One way to begin to establish a relationship with the speaking voice of Bishop’s poems is to concentrate on some of the reader’s expectations of the narrator of the descriptive poem. Because the narrator is representing a landscape or object through a description of it, we assume that the narrator has the authority to do so by having seen it herself. In descriptive poetry the description is usually made by a first-person narrator who is implicit in the description but not specifically a part of the poem. It is this speaker, however, who chooses the metaphors and makes the scene clear to the reader.

Because it is an implicit narrator, there is a distance and sense of impersonality created which causes many readers either to assume the narrator's presence is unimportant or to forget that there is a 6

speaker at all. And yet the speaker is there reminding the reader

of their shared knowledge ("This is like . . .", "It is one of those

. . .") or creating a spatia I-temporaI world to which the reader can

refer ("Here," "Now," etc.). It is the speaker who controls our

response to the description not only through the asides and parenthet­

ical remarks, but also through the tone of irony, humor, or dismay that has colored the description.

We expect a more personal statement from an explicit first-person narrator who says "I caught a tremendous fish" than we do from the

implicit narrator who says "Land lies in water." The narrator, by direct address to the hearer, accepts the authority for what is being described and the reader can more easily understand the relationship between the poetic constructs "I" and "you" and discover the social context of the poem. We also assume that the first-person narrator has something of significance to share about what she is describing: a moment of realization or a change in direction or thought.

When the speaker is in the third person, there is again the sense of distance within the description that was apparent with the

implicit narrator. The reader is perhaps aware of the narrator pri­ marily as one who observes and selects which details to share. The third-person narrator is expected to know more than the first-person narrator, but to know it less intensely. There is always the sense of the speaker standing back, not involved but observing clearly and then describing the scene perhaps not accurately but carefully in order to teach or to entertain the hearer. Bishop’s "The Prodigal" is 7 an excellent example of her use of this impersonal yet ironic voice which describes not only the odor, filth and despair of the Prodigal

Son’s life in the pig-sty but also notes humorously that "he hid the pints behind a two-by-four." The reader will still expect there to be something of value and significance within the descriptions by a third-person (for that is an assumption most readers bring to all descriptive poetry), but he will not expect the moment of epiphany which is often characteristic of the first-person description.

When the reader is faced with a dramatic dialogue in a descriptive poem, his conventional assumptions of the role of the speaking voice alter. For example, the assumption of the narrator’s authority is weakened when the two speakers present opposing views of the object or scene described and the reader must decide between them. His decision will depend on his reaction to the relationship established between the two speakers, the context of the speeches, and the manner in which each speaks. The description itself may become subordinate to the interaction between the two speakers in spite of the proliferation of specific and concise details. In Bishop’s "The Monument" the argu­ ment about the usefulness of the monument takes precedence over the description of the object although it is perhaps her most explicit poem in directing the reader where to look and what to see.

It is by studying the relationship between the speaker and the description and then between this dramatically presented description and the reader that the descriptive poem can best be understood. It is from this point of emphasis that Elizabeth Bishop’s poems can 8

become more easily recognized as the skillful poetry that fellov/ poets

have praised.

In his "Preface" to A Way Out, Robert Frost stated that every

poem should be considered dramatic in the sense that someone is speaking to someone else about something.^ The person speaking has

an attitude toward both the subject being discussed and the audience

to whom the statements are directed. It has been suggested that

because of the objectivity of the structure of the descriptive or

pictorial poem, because of the flatness of the visual in words, it is

often difficult for the reader to discover or recognize this dramatic voice or speaker of the scene J' Although there is an implicit first-

person narrator who usually speaks in the descriptive poem, the danger

is that the reader, caught up in how the scene is depicted, rarely

recognizes the voice that is doing the describing. However, the nar­

rator's voice must be heard with all its tonal variations because the

description is as much about the speaker's reaction to the subject as

it is about the subject itself. Reuben Brower defines this speaking voice as being evident in the poem through its relation to its audidnce 12 and subject and as revealed by both its attitudes and tone. It is particularly important to study Bishop's poetry through analyzing the speaking voice because the sense of her poems is very often depen­ dent on the speaker's tone and manner. One of the clearest statements of the function of voice in Bishop's poetry was made by Charles North: 9

What these poems do is make statements, relentlessly. The statements follow from one another, in general, but each is curiously discreet also, as if it were trying to establish its own identity apart from the poem. Everything looks con­ nected ("by 'and' and 'and'") but the connections are at least as magical as rhetorical; the voice is the glueJ^

North, unlike most of Bishop's readers, recognizes that in Elizabeth

Bishop's poetry the sense of the speaker's presence is essential; the descriptions themselves are always secondary to the attitudes revealed by the describer and her use of the language.

It was Roland Barthes, the French structuralist critic, who said that "the best way for a language to be indirect is to refer as con­ stantly as possible to things themselves rather than to their concepts, for the meaning of an object always flickers, but not that of a 14 concept." The descriptive poet, and most assuredly Elizabeth

Bishop, realizes this paradox in the language and the reader of the descriptive poem often is able to construct a world, based on the description, which seems real but whose meaning is difficult to grasp.

When we read a descriptive poem such as Bishop's "The Fish" we are likely to accept the accumulation of visual detail as she pre­ cisely describes the fish and believe that we can see the fish that was caught. As readers we expect the description to fit our concept of fish and would be disconcerted if she mentioned legs, for example, on this fish. Even though we realize that this fish is fictional and within the created world of the poem, we expect Bishop to give us a description that represents a reality outside of the poem. In

"The Fish" this expectation is met through visual details and 10

specific references to the physical qualities of the fish. When

there are place names or proper names in a descriptive poem, "Arrival

at Santos," for example, as readers we also assume that these elements

are referring to a world shared by the poet and the reader. Whether

we have been to Brazil is not important; we accept the accuracy of the

description of the harbor at Santos because we accept the speaker's

authority. If Miss Breen is a fictional character or not again is

unimportant. By naming her as a character at the scene, the poet has

made her an element of the visual picture of the poem. The poet’s

use of specifics, place names and proper names has seemed to direct the

reader to realities of a world outside of the poetry which will authen­ ticate the description of the poem. In "The Man-Moth" Bishop balances the details of a real-world city with the behavior of a surreal

fantasy figure so that the reader is able to read, the poem without difficulty although all the references are not to a world with which

he is familiar. William Gass said of visualization in reading Iitera- 15 ture that "the point is never the picture," and so it is that while we assume descriptive poetry to be representationaI and pictorial, we do not discover the poem by visualizing the scene.

As well as assuming that a descriptive poem will in some way represent a reality outside the poem, the reader expects the descrip­ tive poem to contain,' complete within itself, some significance beyond the description. In descriptive poetry we expect some overriding sense of metaphor which will connect and give meaning to the accumu- 16 iated detail of the poem. We also expect to find an attitude expressed toward the subject or a tone of voice present within the

description. Realizing that the "I" and "you" of a poem are poetic

constructs, we still expect that there is an implied relationship

between the speaker and the hearer in the poem and know that our

understanding of the poem will be contingent upon recognizing this relationship. It is only through the awareness of these relationships that the descriptive poem takes on a significance beyond the scene or object described.

An attempt to come to an understanding of the speaker may seem to be an obvious approach to the study of poetry, but it is an approach which Elizabeth Bishop's critics have virtually ignored. This does not mean that there has been a complete failure to mention the narrator in studies of her poetry. The voice in Bishop’s poetry has been described as "detached," yet at the same time so very personal that the poet has been accused of writing for herself rather than for any reader. Critics have said on the one hand that she uses a narra­ tive voice that is so remote that it cannot be recognized within the poems, and, on the other, that the voice is informal, friendly and conversational. This confusion in the readers' awareness of voice indicates a need to discover the nature of the voice that makes the visual statements in Bishop's poetry. It should not be surprising that many critics of Bishop's poetry, who have ignored the speaker, are prone to give psychological and biographical misreadings which take the reader far away from the poems themselves into the private worlds of the critics. 12

In Chapter Two of this study, Elizabeth Bishop’s poems of place will be examined. A survey of the titles of Bishop's volumes of poetry will show her interest in geography and place (North & South,

Questions of Travel, Geography III), and more of her poems concern the description of a landscape than any of the other groups. Very few of these poems involve a first-person reaction to a scene ("At the Fishhouses" is a notable exception); instead, most could be labelled poems of impersonal description. These poems present their subjects with precise details, carefully describing each aspect of the scene as it comes in view. In "Florida," for example, the speaker supplies interesting data about the physical aspects of the land, the fauna and flora, but through the occasional empathetic adjective it is clear that the speaker is emotionally responding to the scene. In these poems the use of the implicit first-person creates an impersonal tone or distance from which the descriptions are given. The emphasis on the world outside the poem to which the speaker is referring is perhaps more noticeable in these descriptions of places than in any other group of Bishop's poems. ("Over 2000 Illustrations and a

Complete Concordance" contains not only specific references to various foreign countries but also to the historical icons of Christianity.)

It will be important in the chapter of these poems of place to study the function of the speaker who hides her presence behind a seemingly impersonal record of what has been seen. The critics have, in their responses to these poems, usually ignored the speaker altogether and concentrated on the realism of the description. It is worth speculating 13

on the possibility that the poet expects the reader to do just that:

to see only those outward elements of the description while forgetting

what or who has shaped them. An analogy could be made between these

readers and the tourists in "Questions of Travel" who list each new experience but wonder if they would not have gained more by staying at home.

Chapter Three will be a discussion of Bishop's poems of descrip­ tions of objects which are closely aligned in approach with her poems of place. Again the speaking voice is predominately impersonal and speculative. Rhetorical questions are asked as a way of suggesting the shape and design of the object. The speakers in "The Map" and

"Large Bad Picture," for example, rely on specific details which describe so carefully that they seem to be musings uttered while the speaker stared at the object. The questions imply an attitude or reaction of the speaker beyond making a simple description. In both

"The Monument" and "The Fish" it becomes apparent that the speaking voice intends to emphasize a feeling or experience of far more signi­ ficance than the description itself could indicate. While the place- poems are essentially pictorial descriptions filtered through a speaker's experience, this second group seems to be poems in which the object has become an objective correlative for the speaker's reac­ tions to an experience or for her aesthetic.

Chapter Four will concentrate on Bishop's poems of people. In this third group of poems, the primary emphasis is still on the descrip­ tion related, but the telling is now done exclusively from either a 14

first- or third-person point of view. Many of these poems are

dramatic monologues told by a narrator (like the one in "ManueIzinho")

who is not intent on keeping the distance between herself and the per­

son whose appearance and behavior she describes. There is a sense

of immediacy also in the third-person narrative poems of this group

which is not present in many of the poems of the earl ier groups. The

speaking voice of the narrator describing in the third-person creates

a feeling of an intimacy that speaker and reader share, an insight not

available to the person described in the poem. This use of the speaking

voice in these poems often creates as much an illusion of an outside

reality as did the impersonal voice of the poems of place. In the place poems the reader was guided to a real world through accumulated details which referred outside the poem; in these poems the reader is caught in an illusion of intimacy in the relationship established between the speaker and the reader. The asides refer the reader to some shared knowledge outside the poem which alters his reactions to the person described. In studying this group of descriptive poems, which is the second largest in Bishop's canon, it will be important to study this new relationship which has developed between the reader and the speaker and determine how it influences the description and the response to it. The implications of the speaker's relations to the events, the people, and the landscape against which these people and events operate will become important in noting how the reader responds to the speaker's tone of voice.

Following these three chapters on the major groups of Elizabeth 15

Bi shop’s poetry will be a cone Iud i ng chapter which will discuss

Bishop's poetry in terms of the major developments in American poetry

of the twentieth century. Bishop is an important twentieth century

poet because her significance is not limited to one school or one

group of poets. Early in this century she was seen as a poet whose

work closely resembled the objectivism of William Carlos Williams and the language and image play of Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. It

has already been noted that she has played an important role in the

poetry of such later poets as Robert Lowell, John Berryman and John

Ashbery. Her influence extends to poets of such diverse schools as the neo-surrealists and the confessional ists.

While the intent of this dissertation is to discover a better way for reading and studying Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, it should be under­ stood that approaching the study of her poems through concentrating on the narrator will not solve all the problems of meaning in her poetry. However, the importance of the narrator in the descriptive poem and of the reader's response to that narrator must not be ignored any longer. It should be clear through this study that the referential meaning of the words of the poem is not a valid meaning without the additional support of the speaker's relationship to the world outside the poem itself. The poem should be capable of meaning within itself through an analysis of the speaker and of the words she speaks which give to the reader the visual picture of her landscape. Footnotes

^Randall Jarrell, "Fifty Years of American Poetry," The Third Book of Criticism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), p. 325. 2 Allan Seager, "One-Man Band," The Glass House: The Life of Theodore

Roethke (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968), p. 269.

^Robert Phillips, The Confessional Poets (Carbondale: Southern

Illinois Univ. Press; London: Feffer and Simons, 1973), p. 99. A ^Stanley Kunitz, "Poet: 'A Slightly Laughable and Glamorous Word':

A Conversation with Robert Lowell," A Kind of Order, A Ki nd of Folly:

Essays and Conversations (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), p. 156.

3John Ashbery, "Second Presentation of Elizabeth Bishop," WorId

Literature Today, 50, No. 1 (1977), 8.

^Karl Malkoff, "Elizabeth Bishop," Thomas Y. Crowe I I's Handbook to

Contemporary Poetry (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973), p. 67.

^Ashley Brown, "An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop," Shenandoah, 17,

No. 2 (1966), 11-12.

®For a fuller discussion of the function of detail in establishing this sense of reality through descriptive passages in fiction (and, I think, poetry as well) and for suggestions of ways to trace the evidence of the narrator's voice in these descriptions, see "Narrative Constructs," pp. 192-202 in Chapter 9: "Poetics of the Novel" in Jonathan Culler,

StructuraIi st Poetics: StructuraIism, Li ngui sties, and the Study of

Literature (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975).

^Randall Jarrell, "Poets," Poetry and the Age (New York: Knopf,

1953), p. 235. i 7

^Robert Frost, "Preface" to A Way Out, in Robert Frost: Poetry and Prose, ed. Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrance Thompson (New York:

Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972), p. 272. 11 _ Geoffrey Hartman speaks to this issue in his response ("ihe Use and Abuse of Structural Analysis: Riffaterre's Interpretation of Words­ worth's 'Yew Trees'," New Literary History, 7, i [1975], 165-89) to

Michael Riffaterre's article "Interpretation and Descriptive Poetry: A

Reading of Wordsworth's 'Yew Trees'," New Literary History, 4, ii (1973),

229-56. Hartman suggests that one of the flaws in the structuraIist reading of the descriptive poem is that there is no consideration of voice in the poem. His concern, like that of this dissertation, is that the critic's unawareness of a descriptive poet's use of narrator (especial ly the implied narrator not overtly present in the poem) has led to mis­ readings of the poems. i o Reuben Brower, "The Speaking Voice (Dramatic Design)," The Fields of Light (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1951), rpt. in John Oliver Perry, ed., Approaches to the Poem: Modern Essays i n the Ana lysis and Interpre­ tation of Poetry (San Francisco, Calif.: Chandler, 1965), pp. 259-70.

^Charles North, "Abstraction and Elizabeth Bishop," The Poetry

Project Newsletter, 48 (October 1, 1977), 6.

^As translated by Culler, Structuralist Poetics, p. 194.

15 William H. Gass, "The Concept of Character in Fiction," New

American Review 7 (New York: New American Library, 1969), p. 135.

V^Reuben Brower, "The Aura Around a Bright Clear Center," The

Fields of Light (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1951), p. 37. I 8

1?See James G. Southworth, "The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop,"

Co I I ege Eng Ii sh, 20 (1959), 213-17, and Janet Emig, "The Poem as

Puzzle," Co I I ege Eng Ii sh, 52 (1963), 222-24, for examples of the sort of misreadings to which I am referring. Chapter 2: "Should we have stayed at home?" Analysis of the Poems of Place

it is in Elizabeth Bishop's poems of place that we can see the

purest examples of her pictorial or descriptive poems. She presents

in these poems landscapes depicted through observation of minute and

seemingly unrelated details. Jan B. Gordon has accused Bishop of

writing "pseudo-landscapes," of exhibiting the responsibiI ity only of

a map-maker who charts the particulars and not that of a poet who risks

making connections between the details presented; she presents, he

states, "a world well-drawn and accurate, given the nature of current exploration, but exhibiting more and more the quality of a guidebook."'

Stephen Stepanchev also has trouble with Bishop's descriptions of

landscapes and although he finds striking use of detail, he does not

see that Bishop is able to control the "scattering of images" to pro­ vide a unified structure for the poems: "It is as though Miss Bishop stopped along the road home to examine every buttercup and asphodel she saw. The images are dazzling; they call attention to themselves

like ambitious actors in minor roles; but they contribute very little 2 to the total effect." These critics are examples of those who have failed to find the connectedness in Bishop's descriptions of places because they have concentrated on the observations themselves and not on how the speaker responds to them.

It is only recently that readers have become aware that the

images in these poems are connected through Bishop's use of the speaking 20

voice. In his application of M. H. Abrams' formula for the "Romantic nature lyric"^ to Bishop's landscape poems, Willard Spiegelman suggests

that Bishop's poems proceed from an introduction of the scene to "an

investigation of its properties, a meditation in the form of a soliloquy

or dialogue with some interlocutor, and L+hen] a return to the object r n 4 Lor scenej with deepened understanding." Although Spiegelman does

not then state the obvious conclusion that it is the speaking voice

who controls this process in the descriptions, this function of the

speaker can be observed through studying Bishop's poems of place.

Elizabeth Bishop's "Florida" has been discussed as a purely

descriptive poem which exhibits "the quality of a guidebook" through 5 scenes that are reproduced and not experienced. It is a good poem

with which to begin this study of Bishop's poems of place because of

Bishop's use of the implied narrator. Many critics have described

this poem as a failure because they have been unable to discover any

sense of speaker in it at all. "Florida" is described in such a way that the landscape can be easily translatable into the visual. We are shown in almost every line of the poem aspects of the land from the dark and decaying marshes of mangrove roots and charred stumps to the palm trees and ornamental green of the delicate plants "arranged as on a gray rug of rotten calico" (I. 26). Bishop emphasizes the visual scene by pointing out not only cofors in this landscape (white, green, blue, gold, gray, black) but also the quality of these colors

("cold white, not bright," "black velvet," "ugly whites"). She pre­ sents with clarity smaller scenes within the larger landscape; for 2! example, we are shown the pelicans standing "on the sand-bars drying their damp gold wings/on sun-lit evenings" (II. 15-16) and the skulls of dead turtles lying on the beaches "with round eye-sockets/twice the size of a man's" (II. 19-20). The motion of the pelicans clowning in the tidal currents (II. 12-16) and the buzzards circling the swamp

(II. 30-32) is set against the landscape of the water and land. The detail of this poem is related by pointing out what can be seen; almost every line is concerned with showing what makes up this state. This poem could be cited as an example of a representational picture of the state, but simply recognizing this visual scene does not do justice to the tonal quality of the poem.

Two obvious ways in which this description transcends the merely visual is through Bishop's use of aural images and her use of adjec­ tives which refer to emotional states that cannot be easily translated into the visual. We are told of "unseen hysterical birds who rush up the scale/every time in a tantrum" (II. 9-10), of palm trees that clatter "like the bills of the pelicans" (I. 22), and of mosquitoes

"hunting to the tune of their ferocious obbligatos" (I. 37). The tanagers are "embarrassed by their flashiness" (I. II); the turtles are "helpless and mild" (I. 17). The state, which has been described through the poem with specific visual details, is presented finally through the sound of the voice of the alligator as it whimpers "in the throat/of the Indian Princess" (II. 47-48), unable to make either a positive or negative statement about the state. The speaker is using these emotive words and images to move the poem from the mere 22

visual description to a presentation of her experience of the scene.

Even in this most visual of Bishop's place poems, there is obviously

something far more than visualization occurring with the reader as

he reads the description. The speaker is guiding the reader by estab­

lishing the responses that would be appropriate to the description

she is presenting. She will, throughout the poem, show us what she

has seen and how we then respond to these scenes is influenced by how

she describes them.

In "Florida," the speaker gives us clues within the description

which tell about her relationship to the place she is describing.

From the first two lines:

The state with the prettiest name. The state that floats in brackish water,

she establishes a distance from the description by not speaking in the first person, or even any person explicitly. She is instead just

commenting, throwing out some remarks about the state and not committing herself directly to an attitude toward the scene. She is careful to ma i ntain this illusion of objectivity i n the ear Iy part of the poem.

The ambiguity of her reaction to the description is obvious even in these first two lines as she suggests that the state has the prettiest name but is at the same time floating in brackish water. The connota­ tions of "brackish” suggest not only the salt flavor of the ocean sur­ rounding the state but also that there is something distastful and unpleasant about this place however prettily named it is. In the first seven lines she asserts the ambiguity of her response to the scene she .. 23

is describing through repeated life/death, beauty/decay dichotomies which she carries throughout the poem. We see beautiful birds, watch playful pelicans and then are faced with the grim death of the helpless and mild turtles (II. 8-20). The rain refreshes the beautiful plants that are then said to be arranged on the rotten swamp (II. 21-29), and so on throughout the poem. The constant switching from one set of

images to another is finally resolved in the final eleven lines as she describes the state after dark. It is then that she feels the dreadfulness of this corrupt and careless state which has become "the poorest/post-card of itself" (II. 42-43). As Anne Stevenson suggests, it is in these lines that the speaker commits herself to a moral view of the state she has described: "the landscape is nothing and it is the poet who makes the landscape and sees it as evil."? In this description we do not, finally, visualize the state of Florida but we understand the terror the speaker feels in seeing the ugliness of decayed nature as it is epitomized in the alligator whimpering in the 8 throat of the Indian Princess (the image of Florida). -The speaker, who has seemed carefully aloof and observant while accumulating the specific details of her description, has actually created and presented a landscape fulI of terror. The rather objective opening description of a state full of color and life changes into a recognition on the part of the speaker that there is also much that is ugly and decayed.

The marsh, littered with skeletons and skulIs, echoes with shrill hysterical cries of hidden birds and the clatter of palm trees. The

"monotonous, endless, sagging coast-1ine/is delicately ornamented" 24

(II. 28-29) with the bright greens of plants and fruits. The thirty or more buzzards slowly closing in on a dead carcass in the swamp are seen through smoke and when the moon rises it is "cold white, not bright" (I. 40) illuminating the corruption of the land. The poem

is not functioning as a vehicle for visualizing a landscape because, as the language and images of the poem show, Bishop is primarily con­ cerned with relaying the speaker's emotional response to the place and not with painting a picture. "Florida" is an example of what Donald

Davie calls the "poetry of 'the objective correlative,' which describes, not the emotion itself, but a symbolic landscape or action which may 9 stand as its equivalent."

Perhaps the problem some have had in understanding that Bishop's descriptive poetry is more than verbal paintings is that they expect a poet to interpret the scene for them, to close the poem with a state­ ment that will unite the details of the description and provide a meaning for it. In most of her poems of place descriptions—whether of a landscape, the interior of a house or a collage of a variety of places—Elizabeth Bishop is careful to provide the reader with a number of specific details that often seem related only in that they are parts.of an entire scene. Most often their relationship to that scene is not formally stated beyond their obviously being the parts of a whole. It is only by noticing the development of the speaker’s response to the scenes—beginning with a purely objective description and moving toward some recognition of herself through an emotional reaction to the scene—that we can fully appreciate the carefulness 25

with which Bishop reveals important information through modifiers

and ironic images which its significance is sometimes obscured by

the accumulated detail. The reader who becomes involved only in the

visual picture or in the realism of the details soon loses a sense of both the speaker and the significance of her description of the scene. The general reaction to "The Bight," for example, illustrates this type of response.

Like "Florida," "The Bight" accumulates the details of a land­ scape and states them in a matter-of-fact, rather musing way. The first line: "At low tide like this how sheer the water is" establishes the setting as the bight at low tide and the speaker’s tone as conver­ sational as she shares an observation that is not new ("like this" assumes that there have been other times when she has seen the same scene). She remains aloof and distant from both the scene and the reader and often formalizes her observations in an effort to make them appear impersonal. ("One can smell it turning to gas; if one were

BaudeIaire/one could probably hear it turning to marimba music" Ell-

7-8], for example.) The description depends on an accumulation of details as the speaker points out to the reader the paradox of dryness in a watery setting. The "white, crumbling ribs of marl" (I. 2) pro­ trude from the dry bank, the boats are dry, the pilings are "dry as matches" (I. 3). She even describes the water itself as dry: it

"doesn't wet anything" (I. 5) but is like gas in color and smell.

•Against this static and setting she points to the movement-of the dredge playing the "dry perfectly off-beat claves" (I. 10), of the 26

pelicans crashing into the gas-like water "rarely coming up with any­

thing to show for it,/and going off with humorous elbowings" (II. 14-

15), of man-of-war birds soaring above the scene, and of "frowsy sponge boats" "coming in/with the obliging air of retrievers" (II.

20-21). Through her delineation of the specific smaller scenes within the larger landscape, the speaker’s presence becomes more and more apparent. She describes a scene which is admittedly ugly and desolate with a sense of familiarity and fun. Unlike her description of the Florida swamp littered with the vestiges of death, the speaker here suggests that the decaying boats littering the bight resemble

"torn-open, unanswered letters" (I. 31). She maintains a casual almost off-hand attitude toward this scene, moving quickly from the nostalgic statement: "The bight is littered with old correspondences"

(I. 32) immediately to the flippant: "Click. Click. Goes the dredge"

(I. 33). In what may be an allusion to BaudeIaire's "Correspondences"

("Colors, sounds and perfumes correspond"), the speaker relates the sounds, movement and sights of the bight as "All the untidy activity continues,/awfuI but cheerful" (II. 36-37). The subtitle for this poem, "On my birthday," suggests that Bishop intends a more personal relationship with this scene than might be apparent through the scenes of the bight. The disorderly useless debris on the scene is perhaps analogous to experiences and memories that clutter her life. Through her humor and sense of the moment, she is able to continue cheerfully in a busy-untidy world.

While the pattern of presenting a description through the use of 27 accumulated scenes and images does not vary substantially from these examples, there are many of Bishop's poems in which the details are more explicitly formed around a central metaphor and in which the speaker more clearly unifies the various images. "Seascape" is an excellent example. The speaking voice of the poem is again the implicit narrator who presents a witty picture of two views of heaven.

One is a "cartoon by Raphael for a tapestry for a Pope" (I. 12), a celestial scene replete with "white herons got up as angels" (I. I), the "Gothic arches of mangrove roots" (I. 8) and "bright green (eaves edged neatly with bird-droppings/Iike illumination in silver" (II.

6-7); and the other is the sterner view of a heaven that has something to do with blackness and a strong glare" (I. 21). The ironic tone is suggested through the choice of these images and is reinforced by the skeletal lighthouse ("in black and white clerical dress," I. 15) who, when it gets dark, "will remember something/strongIy worded to say on this subject" (II. 22-23). While we wait for the lighthouse to share his views with us and illustrate the sterner view of heaven, we have enjoyed the speaker's gentle amusement over a scene which she describes to illustrate the serious division between the stern religion of wrath and discipline and the cheerful religion of hope and love.

In "Cape Breton" the established pattern of Bishop's descriptive poems of place is especially clear. Opening with carefully selected details the speaker first describes the scene wholly through objective observations and then graduaI Iy moves into images which illustrate her 28 own imaginative response toward the sameJ^ As with "Arrival at

Santos" the speaker exerts considerable effort to provide an explicit

picture of perceived things while revealing her concern with what is

not seen: "the road is holding it back, in the interior,/where we

cannot see" (II. 30-31). It is her contemplation of what the mists

conceal that leads the speaker to speculate about the greater signif­

icance of life on the island. It is with a sense of forboding that

the poem ends: "The thin mist follows/the white mutations of its

dream;/an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks" (II. 52-54). The

commonplace scenes, revealed as only a part of a continuous life cycle,

will soon be as abandoned as the disused trails in the interior. The

speaker is careful to note that in this somewhat static scene there

is always movement and sound: "The birds keep on singing, a calf

bawls, the bus starts" (I. 51), and the poem ends affirmatively.

Although the cycle implies the death and abandonment of some elements

of life, the cycle demands survival of others to maintain its continu­

ity.

Elizabeth Bishop does not often in her place poems go beyond the

description of an experience or a landscape and make the explicit

statement which will then unite the details and intellectualize the

scene. She relies instead on the reader hearing the speaker's tone of voice and understanding the selection of details and the manner in

which the descriptions are made. "At the Fishhouses," then, is an

unusual poem in that Bishop allows the speaker to move beyond the

vivid description of the setting and her experiences there to hypoth­

esize about the nature of knowledge. She does not simply present the 29

description to the reader who must decide what the significance is for

her, out she has the speaker interpret the scene for the reader: "It

is like what we imagine knowledge to be" (I. 78). Some of Bishop's

readers have found the explicitness of this ending offensive in that

it undercuts the force of the description, while for others it is an

eloquent example of the finest of her poetic statements. What is

noteworthy about this poem is the function of the speaker: she moves

from the detached spectator whom we have encountered in other poems

to a speaker so personally involved with the scene that she seems com­

pelled to go beyond her description to assert a relationship between

this experience and her conception of knowledge.

The first thirty-one lines of the poem establish the scene, and

like most of Bishop's poems, this description is carefully constructed

by a speaker who gathers together many smaller scenes to provide a

whole and casually shares what she observes with the reader. As she

points them out, we are shown the old man netting, the five fishhouses

with steep roofs and slanted gangplanks, the benches, the lobster

pots, fish tubs, wheelbarrows, and capstan. We are shown the colors of The dark purple-brown net, the silver of herring scales which has

layered all the objects littering the scene, and the rust stains

that iook like dried blood on the ironwork. We are told that it is

evening, and cold, and that the small of codfish "makes one's nose

run and one’s eyes water" (I. 8). Each of these details is designed to create a clear picture and a sense of what she has seen and experienced. But the tone of voice throughout this description is 30 one of detachment, and it is only through her opening statement, "it

is a cold evening," that we are aware of the immediacy of the descrip­ tion. She has been careful to maintain her distance from the landscape

by relying on the formal pronoun "one" when she suggests what the

reaction could be to the fish smell in the area, and she has stayed away from using any emotive adjectives that would indicate her own

responses to the scene.

In the following two sections of the poem the speaker moves to a more concentrated interest in the land (and the fishermen) and its relation to the sea, although she remains quite removed from the scene and describes it still as an emotionally uninvolved observer.

She notes that the vest of the old man, a friend of her grandfather's, is sequined with the scales from the herring. He, too, is silver as are the thin tree turnks that form the ramp on which they haul up the fishing boats. But this silver, whose translucence and iridescence are so transfixing in the gathering evening, is available only by transferring to the land this "principal beauty" from the fish. The preoccupation with the land and its objects, transfigured by the silver, begins to change to a concentration on the nature of the sea.

While the speaker remained close to the land, the sea looked opaque, and it was the land that was translucent because of the reflected silver from the sea (II. 13-20). When she considers the source of this silvery beauty, she shifts her focus to the sea and her tone shifts as well. The land had represented a reality that was observable and could be defined in specific visual details. It was the silver 31

from the sea (which is unfathomable, "like knowledge") that lent the mystery of imagination to the land. When the speaker moves to the water's edge, she is not able to maintain the distance from the description that she had preserved through the first three sections of the poem.

Within the first four lines of the final section there is a considerable change in the speaker's direction:

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly I have seen here evening after evening . . . (II. 47-50)

She begins with a stark description of the sea and then in mid-sentence is diverted by her mention of the seals and proceeds to digress with an anecdote about her experience with a particular seal. She enter­ tains the seal by singing hymns and although he reamins curious, he is unconvinced about the value of this spiritual exercise.'* As

Craie D. Hopkins suggests, "the irony becomes apparent in the speaker’s whimsical effort to teach spiritual values to the seal, whose innate 12 knowledge of nature surpasses man’s." This digression is a strong indication that the speaker is now totally absorbed with what she is saying. She is intent in her concentrât ion on the sea, which she understands to be an element too intense for mortals, but, as is apparent in many situations, she allows herself to be diverted by a story that seems only loosely related to her opening statement. The implication is that the seal who can bear the utter and, for mortals, painful knowledge of nature, does not need the myths that mortals 32

sustain themselves with.

The speaker returns to her original thought but is soon diverted

aga i n:

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, the clear gray ice water . . . Back, behind us, the dignified tai I firs begin. (II. 60-62)

Associating these firs with Christmas, she says that they are

waiting to be Christmas trees and thus shows the fallaciousness of

imposing another human tradition onto nature. Her attention does not

remain with the trees for longer than this general reference but

moves back to the water and to an intensely personal reaction to it:

I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. (II. 67-70) ■

So intent is she in these four lines that she seems to have moved

within herself, repeating phrases that become almost elements in a chant, as she clearly brings this scene close to her experience.^

The speaker moves quickly back into a conversational tone as she

suggests the pain and bitterness a human would experience were he to touch or taste this water. This element which no mortal can bear is

shown to be transcendent over the other three elements as it swings through the air above the world and can "burn with a dark gray flame”

(I. 75). Water is the most fluid of the elements, and none of the other elements can control or quench it. After showing the power and

force of the sea, she then equates it with the nature of knowledge: 33

"It is what we imagine knowledge to be:/dark, salt, clear, moving,

utterly free" (II. 78-79). Like water, our knowledge is not only

derived from a world that is "flowing and drawn" (I. 82)—a changeable

world—but is also, since it is historical, pertinent to both the

present and the past; it is "flowing and flown" (I. 83). Knowledge,

equated as it is with the sea, is mysterious and powerful; both

permanent and fluid, knowledge becomes comp I ete I y one w i th the natura I

elements surrounding the speaker. She recognizes in the water the

fascination and danger of human knowledge.

The speaker in "At the Fishhouses" has carefully moved from the

objective voice of the first half of the poem to an intensely personal

one. By asserting "I have seen it" and showing with forceful images

how closely she equates her idea of the power of water to that of

knowledge, she has assured the reader of her authority for making

these generalizations about knowledge. It is only because the speaker

has moved into this first-person, involved voice that we do not find

the statements she makes at the end of the poem either overbearing

or ri diculous.

This same development occurs in the relationship between the

speaker and the description in "Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete

Concordance." There is a different level of intensity in the voices of the two poems, but the shift from the rather aloof spectator to the

subjective first-person narrator is evident in this poem as well.

.The change is triggered in some part by the framework of the poem it­

self. The first two lines serve as an opening remark to set the tone 34

of disappointment and are followed by several scenes described from

pictures found in a book (which makes the descriptions thrice

removed from the scenes themselves) by an implicit narrator. In line

32 the scenes change to descriptions of places visited and the

speaker relates her experiences in a less formal tone which becomes

even more personal when, in line 54, she shifts to the first-person

singular pronoun "I." After a formal break in the poem, the speaker

switches from a narration of the scenes and events to speak directly

to the reader in exasperation first and then in the form of a command

as she demands that he open the book and then that he explain why her own travel experiences were disappointing.

"Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance" is a strikingly effective poem that has been curiously neglected by most of Bishop’s critics. Those who have mentioned the poem have done so by first suggesting the influence of Baudelaire's "Le Voyage" and then relating the various scenes in the poems to Bishop's travel 14 experiences or to her stories. The significance of the poem is to be found, however, in the structure of the relationships established between the described scenes as well as in the function of the speaker who organizes these relationships.

The first two lines of the poem provide a context for what is to follow in both the specific visual content of the poem and in the attitude and tone of voice of the speaker:

Thus should have been our travels: serious, engravable. 33

The irritability and disillusionment of the speaker who is pointing

out the pictures in a travel book which shows scenes far more important

than any she experienced is apparent by the pattern of that opening

line: X should have been Y. She expected one type of experience (a

serious, engravable one) and was disappointed to discover that her

travels were instead rather trivial. Bishop expresses this same sense

of a traveller's frustrated expectations in "Arrival at Santos":

Oh, tourist, is this how this country is going to answer you

and your immodest demands for a different world, and a better life, and complete comprehension of both at last, and immediately, after eighteen days of suspension? (II. 7-12)

In both of these poems the traveller is searching for a significance that she thinks will be found in seeing other places. She does not, of course, discover anything that will provide the context or meaning

for her experiences. This failure leads her to state wistfully,

"Everything only connected by 'and,' and 'and'" (I. 65), as, indeed,

it is when we begin to describe the places we have seen on a trip.

The only connection between them is that we have been there too.

When the speaker begins to describe the scenes from the pictures 15 in the book she skips over those of the Seven Wonders of the World and chooses scenes that are unfamiliar, "though equally sad and still"

(I. 5). The pictures of the Middle East are full of silence and gesture. While she is ironic in her description of the squatting

Arabs "plotting, probabIy,/against our Christian Empire" (II. 7-8), 36

she quite seriously points out that the symbols of Christianity left

in the area are monuments to death: "the Tomb, the Pit, the Sepulcher"

(I. 10) which symbolize the sterility of these pictures of an empty

land. The Well at which Jesus spoke of the living water is now dry, and only deserted places are left to suggest the life that was there:

"the human figure/far gone in history or theology,/gone with its camel or its faithful horse" (II. 14-16). The speaker moves from this con­ centration on the content of the pictures to an awareness of the book as a physical object with the scenes arranged in various patterns on a page:

Granted a page alone or a page made up of several scenes arranged in cattycornered rectangles or circles set on stippled gray, granted a grim lunette, caught in the toils of an initial letter, when dwelt upon, they all resolve themselves. (I I 20-25)

These pictures, so troubling and threatening in their depictions of foreign places, within the format of the book resolve themselves in the formal patterns of the layout. Then the focus shifts again to the tiny engraved lines that create the picture itself and the speaker shows how these lines, "God's spreading fingerprint" (I. 29), move independently of the scene "like ripples above sand,/dispersing storms" (II. 28-29) and then finally change again to the colors of the picture. The sense of threat that broods in the scenes themselves and is mirrored by the movement in the etched lines can be tolerated only because of the order imposed on it by the layout of The book.

To her own travels the speaker can give no order. These places 37

she visited are various and, although each scene contains some signif­

icant incident, she cart' connect them only by "and" and "and." She

experiences common scenes of civilization (at St. Peter’s, at tea) and

of nature (St. Johns, Dingle), as well as violent scenes of death

(Mexico) and scenes of natural and physical decay (Volubilis, Marrakesh).

There is no framework by which she can set these experiences into some

perspective, and she is frightened by these experiences; we can see

that this emotion becomes the unifying force for the accumulated

scenes. The fear is not a physical one (although in some of these

places she saw dreadful and threatening things), but it is a spiritual

fear focused on the emptiness and non-meaning of her experiences.

She says "It was somewhere near there/I saw what frightened me most of all" (II. 54-55) and then describes a holy grave. The frightening thing about this grave is not its relation to physical death but

instead the absence of what should be sacred and seriously important.

This scene describes visually what she has been saying throughout the poem: there is no longer any purpose in searching for a spiritual awareness of our experiences that will make them less trivial for where there was once power and I Ife there is now only emptiness and s iIence.

The speaker has just stated clearly why she has found her own travels to be disappointing and seems, at the end of this section, to be resigned to acknowledging that they could not have been different.

Yet in the next section she returns to her earlier unhappiness, speaking directly to the reader and demanding to know why she could not have 38 had "serious, engravable" travels. Making him open the book, she points to a picture and asks, "Why couldn't we have seen/this old

Nativity while we were at it?" (II. 68-69). She knows, really, why there is no Nativity to see these days—she has spent a great deal of time pointing out through her descriptions that the hope and inno­ cence of an earlier religious period has been overridden by an empty and frightening void—but she wishes to be told differently, to be shown some way in which we could "look our infant sight away" (I. 74) by seeing a "family with pets" (I. 73) and not by staring at "an open, gritty, marble trough/ . . . half-filled with dust, not even the dust/ of the poor prophet paynim who once lay there" (II. 59, 62-63).

Elizabeth Bishop's poems of place are often also poems of travel. Bishop has always been fascinated by geography and an aware­ ness of physical locality. As a preface for Geography III, she chose a series of questions from an 1884 textbook, "First Lessons in

Geography":

Lesson VI

What i s Geography? A description of the earth's surface.

What is the Earth? The planet or body on which we live.

What is the shape of the Earth? Round, Ii ke a ba I I .

Of what is the Earth's surface composed? Land and water.

Lesson X

What i s a_ Map? A picture of the whole, or a part, of the Earth's surface. 39

What are the d i rections on a_ Map? Toward the top, North; toward the bottom, South; to the right, East; to the left, West.

In what d i rection from the center of the p i cture i s the IsI and? North.

In what d i rection i s the Vo Icano? The Cape? The Bay? The Lake? The Strait? The Mountains? The Isthmus? What is i n the East? In the West? In the South? In the North? In the Northwest? In the Southeast? In the Northeast? In the Southwest?

The questions about geography are reminiscent of earlier questions asked in the title poem of her third book, Questions of Travel. In this poem the speaker is troubled more by her need to travel and see new places than she is by the actual physical qualities of the places she visits. While she lists various sights and experiences, she continually wonders if it may not be better to remain at home: "Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?" (I. 14); "Is it lack of imagination that makes us come/to i magi ned pI aces, not just stay at home?" (II.

55-56).

The speaker's concern with this human need to travel leads her to question not only her purpose in traveling to foreign places but also the basis of that need. She begins the poem in a tone of dismay at the excesses she finds in the new country:

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams hurry too rapidly down to the sea, and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion, turning to waterfalls under our very eyes. (II. 1-5)

This tone continues when she begins her self-examination. Each question reveals her interest in discovering why she, and, by extension, 40

all who seek adventure, is driven to discover new places. She wonders about what right she has to expect to be shown something new: "What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life/in our bodies, we are determined to rush/to see the sun the other way around?" (II.

18-20). The rhetorical questions in the poem are never answered directly, yet implicit in the questions themselves is the response:

life, in all its variety and unfamiliarity, must be observed and experienced whenever the chance is given.

In the third stanza of the poem the speaker shares the excitement of new places through a detailed description of a rather common- scene, a filling station out in the country. The abundance of the natural beauty of the mountains and waterfalls failed to move her with the same sense of admiration and awe as the evidence of the daily existence of those at the gas station. As with her poem, "Filling Station,"

Bishop captures the special quality of human life—with its oddness and inconsistencies—that is evident in whatever setting she finds herself.

Craie Hopkins points out that this "poem is distinctive among Miss Bishop's work in its explicit introspection and meditation."*^

The speaker continually speculates on her need to experience, and even the gas station scene is presented through considering the possibility of what it would have meant to miss seeing the sights. The traveler's introspection leads her to consider Pascal's comment that the unhappi­ ness of men comes from the single fact that they cannot sit quietly in their own room.*^ She seems to conclude that Pascal might "have 41

been not entirely right" (I. 57). The implication at the end of this poem is that the place in which we find ourselves is not one in which we have had any significant choice; it is not really a matter of staying at home or traveling to "imagined places," because it is unlikely that there is a "home" to which we belong.

It is obviously not enough to discuss Elizabeth Bishop's poems of place as verbal pictures whose meaning will come through the visual­

ization of the scene. While it is true that the descriptive poet presents a scene through a series of details and images that create a picture, there is—even in the most purely descriptive poem—the controlling experience of the speaker who guides the reader to make the connections between what is said and how it is said. If we were to see pictures of all the scenes presented in "Over 2000 Illustrations," for example, we would not be able to discover the relationship of these scenes to the disappointment and disiI I usionemnt of a speaker who has found her experiences to be so far removed from the apparent serious­ ness of these scenes. Instead we must see the systems of relationships between imagined experiences and real ones, the pictures of a land and its history, the book that contains the pictures and the content of the scenes, and finally between the speaker's feelings toward the book and toward her experiences.

The presence of the speaker in Bishop's descriptive poetry is not always as explicit as it is in this poem, and there is rarely the appearance of the personal statements that conclude "At the Fishhouses."

Even in poems of first-person narrator ("Arrival at Santos" or 42

"Jeronimo's House," for example) the poet seems to be forcing the

reader to direct all his attention toward the description, toward

the seei ng, and many readers choose to do only that. In her care­

ful ly detailed landscapes, Bishop never moves far from a direct

representation of the commonplace; the images in these scenes are

almost always those particulars that many readers ignore. By con­

centrating on the variety of details in her landscapes, Bishop provides

the reader with a feeling for the unity of the scene before he has

been able even to think of the possible "meaning" of the description.

This feeling is an immediate response to a sense of the speaker who directs the reader toward a knowledge of how the scene has affected him. However, in these poems of place—as well as the poems of objects to be studied in the following chapter, the accumulation of detail leads many readers to lose sight of this speaker. As with the poems of objects these poems of places are presented almost entirely through visual details. As a result, these poems have been susceptible to misreadings. The readers concentrate on how this visualized scene relates to the poet’s life or to a reality outside the poem and fail to discover the relationship of the scene to the speaker, fail to stay with the limits of the poem itself and discover

its significance through the relationships by which the images are organized. The emphasis of this chapter has been to direct the readers of Elizabeth Bishop's poems of place to look beyond the details of the poems and to focus on the speaker. In reading the descriptions of landscape, then, the reader must be careful not to ignore the voice that directs the description. M3

Footnotes

1 Jan B. Gordon, "Days and Distances: The Cartographic Imagination of Elizabeth Bishop," SaImaaund i, 22-23 (1973), 301. 2 Stephen Stepanchev, "Elizabeth Bishop," in American Poetry Since

1945: A CriticaI Survey (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 74.

^M.H. Abrams, "Structure and Style in the Romantic Nature Lyric," i n From Sens i b i I i ty to Romanti ci srn, ed. Frederick W. Hi I I es and Harold

Bloom (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 527-28.

^Wi I lard Spiegel man, "Landscape and Knowledge in the Poetry of

Elizabeth Bishop," Modern Poetry Studies, 6 (1975), 212. 5 Gordon, p. 301. ^Gordon is the least sensitive of Bishop's critics to getting beyond the visual picture and hearing the voice of the speaker whose interest is in establishing between herself and the reader a shared experience and not just to show a picture post-card of the place. He has gone so far as to say that in Bishop's poetry "there is never a voice sufficiently distinctive so as to serve as a vehicle for an assumed dialogue" (p. 301). For Gordon there is merely a "map-maker" whose vision is "peculiarly technologized" and who simply accumulates details to present as surface landscapes.

James G. Southworth, "The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop," Col Iege

Eng Ii sh, 20 (1959), 213-17, shows the same insensitivity when he states:

The prosody fits the subject, the details are presented with accurate economy, the images are imaginative, the reader enjoys himself as he moves through the poems and comes to an end. The experience is similar to that he has had 44

with many paintings where he notices the inter­ esting brush work, finds the juxtaposition of color original, approves of the technical handling of the mass, and then moves on to the next painting. . . . This painter has observed carefully but has not invested the canvas with the richness of his own personality (p. 214).

I Anne Stevenson, Elizabeth Bishop (New York: Twayne, 1966),

pp. 101-02. o As an interesting sidelight, the Indian Princess appears on the

Seal of the State of Florida. It is likely that Elizabeth Bishop, who

is very careful of detail, was aware of how she was interconnecting

these images. 9 Donald Davie, "What is Modern Poetry?" Articulate Energy (London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), rpt. in John Olvier Perry, ed., Approaches

to the Poem: Modern Essays i n the Ana I ys i s and Interpetat ion of Poetry

(San Francisco: Chandler, 1965), p. 316. 10 Sybil Estess, "Toward the Interior: Epiphany in ’Cape Breton' As

Representative Poem," World Literature Today, 50, No. 1 (1977), 50.

^Crale D. Hopkins makes much of the Christian overtones in this

poem by tracing the religious images of churches (steeply peaked roofs of fishhouses), the cross (capstan), seal with baptism and hymns, and

Christmas trees in "The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop," Arizona Quarterly,

32 (1976), 204. ^Hopkins, p. 204.

^Jerome Mazzaro, in "Elizabeth Bishop and the Poetics of Impedi- ment," SaImagundi, 27 (1974), has described this poem as one of recol­

lection and suggests that it is only her recognition of this (I. 67) 45

that "gives emotional content to what otherwise might be a belabored,

si (very description of a cold evening in which an old man sits netting

among five fishhouses" (p. 127). 14 In Mazzaro's reading of this poem, he suggests that the disappoint­

ment the poet expresses is because she never experienced the domesticity

implied by the picture of the Nativity: "The familiar 'family with pets’

that she never really had occupies the same reveries that produce the

desire for travel " (p. 128). As with his reading of "At the Fishhouses,"

Mazzaro's insistence on discovering biographical significance to give

meaning to the images in the poem leads him to misunderstand the poem. 15 Elizabeth Bishop describes two sisters looking at this picture book

in her story "The Baptism," Twentieth-Century Literature, 11 (1966),

71-78:

They had gone through a lot of old travel books that had belonged to their father. One was called "Wonders of the World;" one was a book about Palestine and Jerusalem. Although they could all sit calmly while Lucy read about the tree that gave milk Iike a cow, the Eskimos who lived in the dark, the automan chess-player, etc., Lucy grew excited over the accounts of the Sea of Galilee, and the engraving of the Garden of Gethsemane as it looks to-day brought tears to her eyes. She exclaimed "Oh dear!" over the pictures of "An Olive Grove," with Arabs squat­ ting about in it; and "Heavens!" at the real, rock-vaulted Stable, the engraved rocks like big thumb-prints (p. 72).

^Hopkins, pp. 208-09.

*?BIaise PascaI, "Pensées, Section II, 139": "j’ai découvert que tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repose, dans une chambre." Oeuvres de Biaise Pascal, 46 ed. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1904), p. 53. Chapter 3: "It is the monument" Analysis of the Poems of Objects

Elizabeth Bishop's poems, when read as investigations of a speaker's relationship to a place, object or person, reveal an awareness of the ideas and feelings illustrated by the descriptions of these subjects. The poems of place reflect not only the speaker's feelings toward a specific sort of place but also serve as the

impetus for recognizing feelings that are somehow nurtured through the experience of that place. In other words, the speaker’s response is not to the landscape itself but to the feeling evoked by her relationship to that landscape, a feeling which in turn dictates the limits of the relationship. The speaker often only hints at her attitudes and, in a hesitant and tentative tone of voice, specu­ lates on possibility rather than states a positive thesis. Her practice of presenting careful, specific physical details of an outside recality to which the description refers often masks the importance of the speaker and the process through which she comes to recognize her own responses and then to share them with the reader.

Through the description of the place, she is discovering her relation­ ship to it and, by the end of the poem, has come to a new recognition of self.' This need for developing a meditative approach to the landscape or object she is describing causes her to write, in effect, 48

what Wa I lace Stevens describes as "The poem of the mind in the act of

,f1 nd i ng/',‘/hat will suffice" ("Of Modern Poetry"). This is not, of course, a new way of describing a response—this discovery of feeling through landscape description—but it is in Bishop's poetry such a quiet yet pervasive force that the reader of her poems is often unaware that the poem is something other than a painting of a scene.

In her descriptions of objects Elizabeth Bishop does not funda­ mentally change this approach and uses the object as a beginning for the speaker to question and contemplate her assumptions and responses toward it and her relationship to it. The object becomes an expres­ sion of an outer, physical, reality which serves as a symbol of or a guide to an inner process of awareness. While describing the aspects of a map or an iceberg or a monument, she talks of her aesthetic of art and poetry, of the role of imagination and its relation to reality.

Unlike Stevens who was concerned with maintaining a necessary balance between the two, Bishop does not worry about the one encroaching upon or engulfing the other but emphasizes the power of the imagination to transform reality by changing the way in which reality is perceived.

Her objects are presented as things to be viewed from all angles, to be seen as variously as possible. In the motionless and fixed we see movement and change. Inanimate objects are emotional, live, and we are encouraged to wonder about their behavior and motives. In her surreal and dream poems Bishop even more obviously presents a world that is distorted or transformed by the angle of the seeing. It is in the speaker and her way of perceiving the objects that the key to 49

these poems exists. In several poerns the speaker remains a rather

detached observer who conversationally points out different ways to

see the objects and speculates on their possible purposes or behavior.

The reader is left with the task of sorting out the ambiguities to

discover the significance in these changing perspectives. At other times the speaker undergoes a dramatic change as a result of shifting her viewpoint to see the object as something other than what it first seemed, and the reader becomes caught up in this transformation within the relationship between speaker and object. In all of these poems, however, the object serves as a metaphorical expression of an

idea which the speaker is contemplating or an experience which has brought a new awareness to her.

"The Map" is the opening poem in Bishop’s first volume, North &

South (1946), as well as in Comp Iete Poems (1969). Its placing is

important, for the map stands as a central image for Bishop’s interest in geography and travel and serves as a guide to both her landscapes and her attitudes toward poetry. Ostensibly about the relationship of a map to its physical counterpart (in this case the Northern

Hemisphere) and, within the map itself, of the land to the sea, it is also a poem about the craft of poetry. The map represents the reality of the world and creates another, more refined, world in the colored shapes which actively take part in both their creation and their relationships to each other.

Technically the form of the poem is designed to supplement the content by carefully controlling and balancing the language patterns as 50

the map itself harnesses the movement and life of the land and draws

an impression of its shapes on paper. The first and third sections

are octaves which contain a heavy use of alliteration and assonance

as well as a double pattern of rhyme and repetition, a couplet

enclosed by two lines with repeated end words. The pattern of both

sections is this: a beginning quatrain of descriptive statement

followed by a series of rhetorical questions made up in the first

section by a quatrain, in the third by only the first two lines of a

quatrain. In the final section these questions are followed by two

lines which sum up the speaker's attitude toward mapmaking. The middle

section, in which the speaker excitedly jumps from one aspect of the

map to another, has no such pattern and depends on other stylistic

devices to illustrate her response to the map: repetition of word

patterns, of adverbial clauses, and assonance. "The names of" is

repeated twice in a run-on sentence that reflects in its language

and form the effect of the names moving across the face of the map:

The names of seashore towns run out to sea, the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains —the printer here experiencing the same excitement as when emotion too far exceeds its cause. (I I .14-17)

The speaker in this section has become like the printer, filled with an excitement that causes the pattern of the description to become

di srupted.

The tone of voice in this poem, as with so many of Bishop's poems,

is one of conversational musing. The speaker gently points out what

she sees and, using rhetorical questions, leads the reader to speculate 51

with her on the nature of the relationships within the map:

Or does the land lean down to I ift the sea from under, drawing it unperturbed and around itself? Along the fine tan sandy shelf is the land tugging at the sea from under? (11. 5-8)

She is curious about whether the land lifts the sea around it or tugs

at it from under, whether the countries can choose colors which suit

their characters or the surrounding water. In these speculations she

is really wondering which had control over the creation: the mapmaker

or the elements of the map itself. The specific concern over the map

can be extended to include Bishop's interest in the relationship between

any maker and his creation. Although in other poems Bishop speaks

to the question of the nature of art ("The Imaginary Iceberg," "The

Monument") and to the problem of the source of the maker's art ("The

Weed," "Sleeping Standing Up"), it is on Iy in "The Map" that she

speculates so freely on the power of the material to create its own

form. In the way that the map must represent the land it is charting,

so poetry must represent life, the imagination must be rooted in the

real. (In her own work Bishop has shown how strongly she feels that

the poem depends on a physical awareness of its subject.) Yet the

map is flat, an artificial construct, and therefore can only distort

its subject and through the distortion create a new reality where lands

look like animals, where colors are arbitrarily chosen for flat shapes. The mapped land is mysterious (we do not know what its

relation is to the sea; we do not know what depends on what). The

land is strange and shadowed, still. The bays seem able to create 52

life or to entrap it, but they are under glass: dry, flat and lifeless.

There is no traditional sense of geography or space; every direction

is as near. In this mapped land it is only the names, the words

themselves, that are active as they run to sea and cross mountains.

The map is carefully wrought to represent reality, but it is, actually,

only an artificial world. It has been suggested that this map, "like

the poem about the map, not only represents the world but being a human 2 work it is greater than the world it represents." The map is the

printer's excitement; it is the result of the mapmaker's careful

choice and planning and, even more so, careful manipulation of color

and shape and relationships. It is fragile, man-made, and while it

may be an accurate representation of an outline of the land, it is

mostly a creation that can serve as a guide through the reality but is

not a true picture of that reality.

What Bishop says of the relationship between the map and the

world it represents is true of the relationship between her descriptive

poems and the places, objects and people to which they refer. She,

like the mapmaker, is careful to present specific and accurate details with what appears to be an impartial, observant eye. Both, however, present a refined and controlled world. The practical use of a map

is to guide, but it also serves to put the world into an acceptable and manageable form. Bishop states in the final line: "More delicate than the historians’ are the mapmaker's colors." The enormous land and sea masses which provide the battlegrounds and shifting borders

for the historian's study become the delicate patterns of shaded 53

color on the mapmaker's map, thus reflecting a driving force of much

modern and contemporary poetry to create in poetic form some sense of

order to what is otherwise a chaotic and threatening world.

"The Monument" is another object poem .about artistic creation and

the relationship between the artist and his work, between the work and

the world. The poem is structured as a dialogue between a person who

appreciates the arts and one who finds reality preferable to imagina­

tion, the practical to the aesthetic, and it develops from an opening

detailed description of the object to a defense of art as represented

by this monument.

At the beginning of the poem it is as if we were eavesdropping on a conversation that began before the speakers were within earshot.

When we overhear them, the aesthete is saying "Now can you see the monument?" (I. I), a question which implies either that she has dis­ cussed the object with him earl ier (and the emphasis is on the word

"see") or that she has tried, unsuccessfully, to show him the work at another time (and the emphasis is on the word "now"). In the following thirty lines she points out the visual details that make up the object which is the monument: the wooden boxes with their jutting wooden ornaments piled high against the grained wooden sea and sky.

Although the physical elements of the object are stressed in this section, the poem is not one intended to describe the object but 4 rather to focus on the reactions of the people who are seeing it.

The first speaker stresses the artificiality of the scene behind the monument ("A sea of narrow, horizontal boards," I. 24; "A sky runs 54

para I IeI,/and it is palings," II. 28-29), but her companion has

mistakenly supposed the landscape to be real. It is when, in his

second speech, he realized it is not that he feels annoyed, angry

and cheated. It is in response to this reaction that the apology for

art is made (II. 57-78).

In order to understand what Bishop is saying in this poem about

the function of art and the artist, it is useful to pay attention to

the changes which occur in the perception of each of the speakers and

in their relationships to the monument. As already noted, the dialogue

begins with a clear and precise physical description of the object

by the aesthete. While she points out the tangible presence of the

monument, however, she also admits to the illusionary quality of a work

of art that is designed to appear as if there would be "no ’far away’"

and yet whose viewers will always remain apart and away from it. The

monument is the work of art that is totally imaginative and separate

from the world, while at the same time it is set in relation to an

imitation of that world:

A sea of narrow, horizontal boards lies out behind our lonely monument, its long grains alternating right and left like floor-boards—spotted, swarming-stiI I, and motionless. A sky runs parallel, and its palings, coarser than the seas: splintery sunlight and long-fibred clouds. (II. 24-30)

The pragmatist's response to seeing this object is to recognize the abstract monument as something other than reality but to demand

sounds from the representationaI sea. When he senses that he will not 55

hear them, he seeks some framework in the world that, however foreign

to him, is still real and could account for this unfamiliar scene

("Where are we? Are we in Asia Minor,/or in Mongolia?" II. 33-34).

This person becomes rattled by the sight of the object and continues the argument about the monument while almost ignoring the attempted explanations of his companion. When she speculates on the possible mystery and romance of the monument, he discovers that the sea and sky are made of wood and that these materials create a make-believe and flat world. When told that he is seeing a monument with all the conno­ tations of grandeur and commemoration, he points out that the object is made up of old, unpainted piled-up boxes, not grand at all. The explanation of natural deterioration does not deter his indignation and he becomes resentful at having been brought to see what he calls

"A temple of crates in cramped and crated scenery" (I. 53). His developing awareness of the artificiality of the scene leads to his angry demand for some practical use for this object ("what can it prove?" I. 54) and that demand provokes the other speaker to defend this monument and, by extension, all types of art.

In this apology the speaker returns to the definite statements that characterized her first description of the object. She is no longer speculating on the fanciful possibilities of its origin (as she did in lines 35-38) or on the history of its existence (lines 48-51).

But she opens by stating, "It is an artifact/ of wood" (II. 57-58) and thereby asserts that this monument is both made for some function and has cultural or historical significance. It represents the sea, cloud, 56

and sand by wooden imitations of them and, like the map, this form

both expresses the real while it creates a separate reality of its own:

Wood holds together better than sea or cloud or sand could by itself, much better than real sea or sand or cloud. (I I. 58-60)

The wooden creation is unchanging, as the map is, but as the sea and

land and sky are not. In both of these poems the object is able to

present a captured reality that has been transformed by its creator

into a new form whose meaning is no longer merely dependent on its

relationship to that which it represents. This monument, unlike most,

does not have an explicit person or scene which it commemorates, and

the speaker is thus able to assert its significance as a work of art

rather than of history. The nature of what this particular monument

commemorates is not important (indeed, only the monument knows what

it shelters) but that it has chosen to be a monument and wishes to

cherish something is important because it illustrates the power of

the work of art to become what is expected. This monument has become

its own reason for existence because while its original purpose is no

longer known, it has come alive as a symbol for commemoration.

The speaker insists on the worth of this object and while she

cannot give utilitarian reasons that would mollify her companion, she can assert that in the viewer's awareness of the monument's volition

is the beginning of art. When a maker creates an object, whether

verbal or tactile, that object becomes a living force which brings to

its observer an awareness of its beauty and otherness. The observer

helps to perpetuate the work of art by his relationship to it. The 57

pragmatist will appreciate it only when he stops demanding it to be

something it is not and watches it become what it is. The speaker

sh ifts from her initial demand that he see the monument (I. I ) to her

final request that he watch it (I. 78); this is indicative of the

relationship between the object, which becomes art as the perspective of the viewer changes, and the observer, who is able to see the vitality

in the old deteriorating monument. This shift in her command also points out the implicit power within a motionless, static work of art to have life and to change. The pragmatist sees only the exterior, the reality of oddly shaped wooden elements. The speaker, on the other hand, is able to recognize the inner life of the artifact because she has the added vision of the imagination.

In both "The Map" and "The Monument," Bishop's interest is in the creative force of the imagination which takes the material of the real world and controls it, transforms it into a clearer, more precise artifact which becomes a truth different from that which it represents.

The created form is superior to its source because it can not only outlast the changes in the physical world but also can take on its own separate being and as such dictate the manner in which the viewer must come to it. It raises questions which cannot be answered in general statements and takes on the meaning that is brought to it by the speaker. The object which the artist transforms into a separate entity in turn is changed again by the perception of those who come to it. "The Map" represents the geography of a part of the world, but these shapes will never change regardless of the changes in the bound­ aries of nations. The colors do not reflect those of the land, and the 58 still, flat surface cannot even hint at the movement of the sea or the terrain of the country. "The Monument" no.longer retains its original significance because it has become a symbol of the need for the act of commemorating and, as this symbol, It has taken on a new reality which serves as a beginning to its Iife as a work of art. These two objects have become important not as practical realities but as imaginative forces which provoke the observer to change his perception and in the process to learn about himself and his relationship to the work.

In "The Imaginary Iceberg," the imagination becomes the massive and powerful iceberg which threatens the ordinary reality of the ship.

It is the nature of the imagination to alter the perception of reality, and the presence of the iceberg in this scene causes the speaker to shift her attention from the practical aspects of the trip to the self- made beauty and force of the iceberg. The speaker insists that in spite of the danger of destruction from the iceberg, it is preferable to the man-made practicality and safety of the ship.

Like the imagination, the iceberg creates itself from within and appears to be self-absorbed: "Like jewelry from the grave/it saves itself perpetually and adorns/only itself" (II. 24-26). The sailors, those most dedicated to the reality of the ship and travel, admire its grace and beauty (II. 12-15); those who are dedicated to the arts find in it a source for effortless poetic expression (II. 16-22). As the iceberg spars with the sun, so the imagination defies the limits of reality. The speaker, who obviously admires this beautiful and dangerous force, recognizes that its apparent solipsism is not, in fact, 59

its only reason for existence. She only hints that its purpose is also to enhance the scene around it (II. 26-27), but this suggestion

is enough to admit the reader into her knowledge of the workings of the imagination. It has created itself into an intricately beautiful form which, because it is almost totally submerged, has the power to destroy the reality around it, but this iceberg, the imagination, instead brings life to that scene by making it more exciting by its presence. Although this iceberg was so sublime that she had earlier preferred it to the practical realities of the trip, at the end of the poem the speaker willingly leaves this powerful world of the imagination and returns to the warmer less threatening world of reality (II. 28-30). Before she leaves, however, she recognizes the equation between the iceberg and the soul (both of which represent strength, beauty and completeness) and will thus always carry the 5 memory of the power of the imagination with her.

Bishop illustrates both the power of the imagination and of memory in her two poems about paintings done by her great-uncle,

"Large Bad Picture" and "Poem." In both of these poems (as in

"Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance") the reader is thrice removed from the scene described: the poem describes a picture which represents a real scene. It is interesting to see how the speaker’s relationship to the two landscapes is radically different in these two poems which are ostensibly about the same sort of object.

The speaker in "Large Bad Picture" begins the poem by'referring to the painter and his relationship to his picture (before becoming a 60

school teacher, her great-uncle remembered a Canadian harbor scene and

painted it). She then goes on to describe a rather flat and lifeless

painting of cliffs, sea, sky and ships. First she sees the "overhanging

pale blue cliffs" as central, set against a "flushed, still sky" and

skirted by "perfect waves." Then she sees the hundreds of birds

hanging motionless in the sky and the fleet of unmoving ships sitting

on the quiet sea. Soon the speaker changes from merely seeing the

actual picture to imagining the scene. In line 21 she shifts from

describing a static, motionless landscape to experiencing a live

world in which the birds' cries and the sound of the breathing of sea

animals can be heard. Soon the painted sun begins to move round "in

perpetual sunset." As the imagination transforms this scene, the

speaker's language patterns also change and are themselves no longer

static. She repeats words which reach a rhythmic crescendo in the

seventh stanza. Imagination has intensified her relationship with the

painted scene and the picture has become more than an object: it is

now "the beginning of a painting" (I. 76, "The Monument"). The last

stanza drops off considerably from this intensity in tone and urgency

as she shakes off her absorption with the picture and attempts to

regain the distance she has as she began to consider the painting.

However, the imaginative forces have altered her perception of the

painting and although she tries to be off-hand about the scene

("Apparently E+he ships] have reached their destination," I. 30), she

•no longer is merely an observer but is considering the ships'

behavior and thus the life implicit in the picture: "It would be hard 61

to say what brought them there,/commerce or contemplation" (II. 31-32).

Since the speaker only speculates on possible motives for the ships’

presence in the harbor, it is easy for the reader to misapprehend the

powerful role the imagination plays in the speaker’s changing

approach to the landscape and not recognize that such' a question would

not have been possible had her perception not been heightened by

imagination. The focus of the description in "Large Bad Picture" has

shifted from observations of the elements of the scene to personal

reflection on the volitional power of those elements. This gradual

change has come about through the transformat ion of the speaker's

perception by the imagination.

"Poem" is also about a painting by great-uncle George (here given

a name) and the changing of the speaker's perception of the picture.

However, there is in "Poem" an excited personal recognition of the

scene that leads to a shared intimacy between the speaker and the artist that is not present in "Large Bad Picture." Then there was no

relationship between the artist and the speaker; now both of them, prompted by memory, have recreated a place that exists only in their mutual reverence for a scene each saw separately and years apart. The artist's representation of the place on canvas has evoked her own mental picture of the same place and then verbal description of it. She cherishes the tiny picture not only because it is of a scene which she knows from childhood, but also because the object itself is "useless and free," passed on from one family member to another "who looked at

it sometimes, or didn't bother to" (I. 9). It has become cramped and 62

dim, like memory, but is also a detailed, live picture of something

that has disappeared. The painting has reminded her abruptly of a

place she had thought forgotten, and, at the end of the poem, the

speaker reflects on the lack of permanence, the frailty of both life

and memory which have become dependent upon each other for meaning.

Helen Vendler points out that the speaker describes the scene three

times in this poem: first visually, second with recognition of remem­

bered landscapes, and finally as seen "by the heart." By this third

description we have moved with the speaker from merely seeing the G place to becoming a part of the scene itself. We can share the

speaker's realization that memory is "the little that we get for free,/

the little of our earthly trust. Mot much" (II. 58-59). The scene

described in "Poem," like the free and useless picture itself, evokes

a life made up of lost connections.

The continual process of losing things is a constant theme in

Bishop's poetry and in the villanelle "One Art," she speaks of life as a process of misplacing objects, places and people. Although the

loss seems to be terrifying, she states wryly, "I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster" (I. 15). What is lost can be remembered and thus recaptured, but she here does not say this overtly as she does in

"Poem." In other poems she has emphasized the power of the imagination and memory to recreate an object into a work of art and here the suggestion is that the act of losing something is continual and never the disaster it appears to be. Although Bishop's concern is often with 63

the fact of loss and the memory of lost places, people and objects, in

"One Art," as with "Poem," the persona is always looking forward

rather than back to what was, and the effect of these poems, is positive

rather than negative.

The ability of the imagination to create a new and often

frightening world through simply shifting the angle from which the

familiar objects are seen is the emphasis in Elizabeth Bishop's surreal and dream poems. The surreal, which breaks down the barriers between waking and sleeping, adulthood and childhood, the logical and the illogical, is expressed by objects which provide a link between the rational and fantastic as we see both their ordinary and their distorted or abstract aspects. It is the shift in the speaker's perception that allows for common objects to become images of an

irrational world. In the prose poem "12 O'clock News," for example, a cluttered desk becomes the horrible and terror-fiI Ied battle ground of a backward country.In "Sleeping on the Ceiling" the ceiling is a peaceful botanical garden with quiet fountains (the unIit chandeIier) and beautiful plants (the wallpaper) where the speaker wants to stay and sleep. However, even in this make-believe world there is the necessity of action and duty: "We must go under the waI I-paper/to meet the insect-gI adiator,/to battle with a net and trident" (II. II-

13). "Insomnia," a rare example of Bishop's love poetry, presents a mirror-refIected world where the speaker, admiring the moon's cool independence, wishes to stay. It is a "world inverted", where there are no cares or troubles and love is possible. These poems show us a 64

world transformed from ordinary reality by the imagination which changes the manner in which it is perceived. Sometimes the speaker seems to suggest that this unreal world is preferable (as in "Insomnia") or that it is only a fantastic version of the real one. For four stanzas

in "Cirque d'Hiver" the speaker describes how the toy circus horse

looks as it moves across the floor with the dancing ballerina on its back. The speaker asserts the artificiality of the toy throughout the description, but she also hints repeatedly of its sadness and intel­

ligence. It is only in the final lines that we recognize that she senses a correlation between herself and the object:

Facing each other rather desperately— his eye is Iike a star— we stare and say, "Well, we have come this far." (II. 23-25)

Both live hopeless, mechanical lives and, more importantly, both perceive their lives as such.

Sometimes in these surreal poems the speaker creates a world in which the dream images represent her struggle to control her thoughts and her imagination. Both "The 'Weed" and "Sleeping Standing Up" are examples of this. In an interview Bishop said that she modelled "The g Weed" on George Herbert's poem, "Love Unknown," and several critics have.taken this statement as the basis for writing a Freudian sexual g analysis of the poem. However, since her emphasis at this point of the interview was on what she described as Herbert's "almost surreal" poetry and not on Herbert's treatment of love, it is probably safe to conclude that the influence is felt more in the grotesque imagery than in the theme of the poem. 65

"The Weed" is a dream vision. The speaker realizes That she is

dead and That her final thought was locked in her heart. Since there

is no I i fe i n this grave, both she and her thought must remain unchanged

in a timeless world. After this scene is,described (in lines 1-8), the

speaker begins to present the changes that occurred when a weed grew

up through the heart, split it open and forced two rivers of water to

flow out of it. The poem is structured so that the appearance of the

weed (inl ine 15) is as startling and persistent in the description as

it is in the speaker’s dream experience. The weed which miraculously

grew out of death and darkness has brought life and light with it.

The water which contains the reflections of all the scenes the heart

once mirrored pours out. It becomes the image of memory which feeds

the artist with lost places and objects of the past that become the

subjects of her creation. The important thing is that these scenes

have become part of the water, or the creative impulse, and are no

longer just brief reflections seen on its surface.

Through the first 50 lines the speaker has told the story of her

dream carefully and deliberately, mentioning each new development as

it happens, clarifying her description with parenthetical remarks. .

She has built the narration up to the point, in line 52, of addressing the weed: '"What are you doing there?' I asked." The reply ("I grow,"

it said,/"but to divide your heart again") forces us to consider the weed as a metaphor for the imaginative forces which lead to artistic creation. The weed is unintentionally growing in the heart (just as memories and creative insights are unplanned for). It is not a 66

nurtured flower but the wild hearty growth—often unwanted—that forces

its way out and forces the speaker to recognize what it represents.

It raises its head (covered with the water of the speaker's thoughts which have been released from the dead heart) and says that its purpose

is to grow in her so that it can continue the process of producing more memories, so that it can force her to recapture her lost experi­ ences and emotions. The power of the imagination will force the weed to develop and grow, awakening the dead heart and illuminating the

ideas that have been hidden and forgotten there.

Quite a different result is described in "Sleeping Standing lip."

It is also a dream poem and describes the struggle to discover the source of ideas, but now the hidden thoughts remain out of reach or are destroyed by the crudeness of the search. Vfhi Ie "The Weed" contained the vital metaphors of growth, light and water, "Sleeping Standing

Up" is filled with images of war, destruction and uncertainty.

The poem begins with an explanation of the altered perception of dreams which allows waking thoughts to give place to the powerful sub­ conscious thoughts. Throughout the night the "armored cars of dreams" track down these throughts ("pebbles," in the poem) in an attempt to discover their source. Following a trail (like the crumbs dropped in the forest by Hansel and Gretel, as the speaker notes), the tanks continue their deadly pursuit all night. By morning, however, they had succeeded only in frightening or killing the thoughts. Like Hansel and Gretel, they lost the trail and could not find "the cottage," which, in the poem, is the impulse of those thoughts. 67

The story of the dream is told from the point of view of one of

the members of the armed search ("in the ugly tanks/we tracked them

down all night," II. 18-19). The speaker aligns herself with the

hunters and regrets that they failed in their quest ("How stupidly

we steered/untiI the night was past," II. 22-23). If we understand

this poem as a metaphor for the encroaching threat of real ity to the

imagination, then we must recognize that there is a discrepancy between

the speaker's expressed point of view and the tone of the poem.

Although she is an active part of the search, she describes it in

terms of its ugliness and brutality and thus causes the reader to

respond to the poem on the side of the hunted. It becomes important

that although the harshness of reality can overturn many specific

thoughts and ideas, it cannot maneuver well enough to find the source

of creativity, and the imagination remains hidden and secure.

Bishop's dream world of surreal images suggests the power of the

unconscious thoughts which form the source of creativity. In these

poems the speaker's altered perception becomes a way of understanding the relationship between the world of reality (here distorted and

threatening) and that of the imagination (the origin of creative life).

"Roosters," on the other hand, is a poem about the contrast

between the brutality of the real life and the refinement of this life by artistic and rel igious imagery. Unlike the surreal and dream poems, "Roosters" insists on the physical reality of its subject but the speaker sees these roosters as images of a mythological world.

The implication in this poem is that the roosters, whose behavior is 68

characters zed by cruelty and terror!zatlon, are also the heralds of

a new beginning.Just as they announced the brilliant sunrise which

shatters."the gun-metal blue dark," they also served to bring glory and

forgiveness to St. Peter whose dark betrayals they had signalled.

»»'hen the sun appears in the final lines it is in the same ambiguous

role of the rooster: "faithful as enemy, or friend" (I. 132).

At the beginning of the poem (lines 1-78), the speaker emphasizes

the ferocious, commanding presence of the roosters. Described in

military images, they scream with "horrible insistence," ordering the

world awake. She describes .thei r cruelty as they strut and gloat,

terrorizing and intimidating not only their hens but also all the

sleeping people. In an apostrophe addressed to the roosters, she

demands to know by what authority these birds, who were unable to

fight successfully against Greeks who sacrificed and shot them, can

force us to awake to a world of "unwanted love, conceit and war" (I.

57). And, as they were helpless in their struggle against human cruelty, so they are helpless in the bloody battles with each other.

The cockfight incites the rooster to such "raging heroism" that he denies "even the sensation of dying" (I. 69), but heroism is not enough. The fight ends with death and the dunghill. The speaker has shifted her emphasis throughout this description and moved from a vivid portrait of the roosters' cruelty and brutality to a sort of grudging admiration for their strength and heroism. This shift in tone leads to the religious and artistic consideration of the last part of the poem.

The roosters have become more than merely images of the ugly force of 69

power; because of their courage, they are now symbols of survival and

change.

In line 79 the speaker moves abruptly from relating the death of

the rooster in the cockfight to discussing St. Peter’s denial of. Jesus

after the arrest. Because it was a deliberate betrayal of trust and

friendship, Peter's sin is described as more reprehensible than that

of Mary Magdalen, traditionally assumed to be a prostitute and, thus,

"whose sin was of the flesh alone" (I. 81). When she relates the New

Testament story, the speaker uses the Luke 22 version and describes the

scene as if it were an artist's small reproduction not only of the

story but also of the past and future of the church. The picture of

Christ, looking at Peter, amazed at his faithlessness, represents

Christ's earl ier prophecy and Peter's fulfillment of it. Peter,

standing with "two fingers raised/to surprised lips" (II. 89-90),

iI Iustrates h i s despa i r about his behavior while it also foretel Is his

later glory, the two raised fingers to become the symbol of the Papal

blessing. Between the two men, carved on a column, is the cock whose fierce cry marked the third denial and caused Christ to turn to Peter

in dismay.

The speaker insists that within this scene there is "inescapable hope" because Peter's sorrow will soon become the source of his later power. Although his denial of Christ is a grave sin, he will learn forgiveness and become the first leader of the Christian church. The speaker shows that the rooster who at this scene symbolized the denial wiI I soon stand over the Laterna in Rome as an emblem to the power of 70

love and The new religion of mercy. At the beginning of the poem the

rooster is seen only as a proud, combative creature capable of

cruelty and dominance. Now it has become the symbol by which Peter

has come to see himself as both an enemy of Christ (as betrayer) and,

as church father, a friend.

The speaker returns from this religious digression to a descrip­

tion of the early morning that began the poem. She has a new under­

standing of the complex relationship between good and evil: from the

sin of Peter's denial came the powerful impetus for good. It may even

be that without his having sinned, Peter could never have known the

forgiveness and love which was supposed to be the basis of the new

religion. The tercets of the poem also emphasize, formally, this

uncertain dependence in the relationship between evil and good because they can, as some have suggested, represent the three separate denials or they could represent the thrice-repeated charge to Peter to become the head of the church (as told in John 21).

The speaker has also changed in her attitude toward the roosters and they are no longer the epitome of evil and power, as they were when the poem began. The world has become beautiful with the sunrise beginning to illuminate it, but whether the sun is "faithful as enemy, or friend," she will not say.

The speaker's discovery of a new way of seeing the arrival of the day has been caused by her recognition of a new perspective by which to understand the roosters whose job it is to herald the sun. In

"Roosters" the vision has come through remembering the religious 7! significance of the object. Her spiritual awareness, then, caused her to see the roosters and their behavior differently at the end of the poem from how she saw them at the beginning. In "The Fish," however, it is through carefully studying and observing the object itself that she comes to a new, almost spiritual, awareness of herself in relation to it.

"The Fish" is a poem told by someone who had caught a huge fish and, after looking at it carefully and recognizing its strength and wisdom, had returned it to the sea. It is a popular enough poem that in almost every study of Bishop's poetry there is at least a paragraph of reference to it. The influence of Hopkins'' (in the language, images, and accentual stress) and Mallarmé (the "I'azur, I'azur,

I'azur" echoed in Bishop's final lines) has been duly noted several times. Speculation has been made about how big the fish was, how ugly the fish was, whether the speaker did indeed catch it (we have, it was said, only her statement that she did), whether the speaker threw the fish back because she was impressed by its size, or because she thought it was courageous and majestic, or because she was, after all, only a woman fisherman.In order to discover the action of the poem, we need to begin with the speaker and how she tells of her experience.

Written in free verse and stated matter-of-fact Iy, the action of the poem is never analyzed by the speaker but is instead described conversationally as she shares with a friend what she saw and did.

The parenthetical asides (lines 22-24, 41-42, 46) lend to the 72

conversational tone of the description and also establish a bond with the reader who is assumed to be sympathetic to her statements. The

repetition of the same pronoun/verb pattern that the speaker uses in explaining her actions ("I caught," "I thought," "I looked," etc.) also reinforces the conversational sense of the poem and its matter-of-

factness.

The speaker is observant and careful that her reader receive a clear idea of how she was moved to let this fish go. She is always

in control of the description and, never allowing the focus to remain settled for long, she keeps the reader first aware of herself, then of the fish, then herself, then the fish, and so on like a movie camera shifting back and forth during a conversation. While she seems to begin with a description of the tremendous fish which is hanging limply half out of the water, the focus has quickly moved from the "I" who caught it to the fish that was caught. Once the fish is centered, she describes first, and briefly, his unusual calmness (II. 5-6) and then in detail provides a vivid picture of his appearance. It wouId be a mistake, however, to see only the emphasis on the fish's outward appearance and ignore the adjective "venerable" (I. 8) which suggests that she senses something almost sacred about this obviously aged fish, although at this point in the description she has noticed only his looks and has not yet really seen him.

The emphasis shifts in Iine 20 when the speaker becomes aware that the fish is dying, "breathing in the terrible oxygen," and that 73

he also has the means to hurt her (II. 22-24). In reminding her

listener of the possible danger in the fish's gills, she allows the

focus of the poem to shift quickly to her own recognition of the fish’s

potential death or violence, but she does not leave it there for long.

Soon she concentrates again on the fish's appearance, this time as

dead and cleaned, again moving back to the object and away from her

relationship to it. Each time her emphasis shifts, she introduces a

new emotional response she had to this object she is describing. Her

acknowledgement of these new feelings lessens the distance between

herself and the fish, a distance that she seems to be so carefully

trying to maintain throughout this description, and finally allows

the reader to know, with her, that she had no choice but to let the

fish go.

When she looks into the fish's eyes (I. 32), the emphasis is

clearly on the speaker. As she compares the fish's eyes to hers and I sees them shift, she realizes that this fish is not interested in her,

does not respond to her. She calls this sullenness (I. 43)—an odd quality in a fish—and admires what she feels to be the fish's resent­ ment at her intrusion in his life. It is because she now feels this admiration that she can see what she could not before: this fish is strong, courageous and wise. She says, "I admired . . . and then I saw" (II. 43, 45). What she saw was the evi dence of f i ve previous catches—five times when the fish had fought hard against the fisher­ man. These "old pieces of fish line" (I. 49) which serve as evidence become "like medals with their ribbons/frayed and wavering,/a five­ 74

haired beard of wisdom/trai I ing from his aching jaw" (II. 59-62).

And it is now that the speaker knows that this fish has kept the

dignity of age, experience, and wisdom in his relationship with her.

He has not fought and so has not compromised this dignity. To explain

her moment of recognition, she says that "victory" and "rainbow" have

filled the boat, using two nouns which describe the intensity of her knowledge and feelings to her listener far more emphatically than any adjectives could have done. Because she can now see the fish as truly

"venerable," an aspect which she noted only casually before, she lets him go. In explaining her action to her reader with so matter-of-fact a tone, she makes it clear that she assumes the reader not only under­ stands what she did but probably would have done the same.

This is not the typical "fish that got away" story, although there are critics who argue it is, for there are none of the fish story elements in this poem. Except for saying that he was tremendous, she does not brag about her catch. Instead of offering excuses for losing the fish or regretting its loss, she simply shares her experience in a way which lets the reader understand what happened. And most importantly, she is not really even talking about the fish as object, but of how she saw the fish and how she felt about the fish and what happened to her to cause her to let the fish go. It takes her awhile to break down her resistance to the telling of this experience. She began by using vivid description to focus the attention away from her­ self and the object so that she could avoid showing too quickly what she felt. Not only is this hesitancy typical when one tells of a 75

particularly moving experience, but this speaker also wants to show

these feelings slowly, as they developed, so that she can be sure that

the reader will not only hear them described but will also come to feel

them as well. When it becomes clear that this poem is about the

speaker's feelings and not the fish, the ambiguity in. lines 63-64

about who had the victory becomes clear. It is the speaker who feels

victorious because she has recognized the unequivocal dignity of her

fish, and her description is such that the reader shares in both her

recognition and her feelings.

"The Armadillo" is another poem in which the speaker intends that

the reader not only see the scene as she describes it but also share

her emotional experience. In the first twenty lines of the poem, she

describes the traditional celebration of the Festival of St. Joseph

(S3o Joao) in Brazil. Although it is illegal, the custom is to send

brightly colored diamond-shaped balloons into the air. When the wick

is lit, the fiery wax paper balloons float up lighting the sky. The

description of these balloons in the dark sky is told matter-of-fact Iy,

conversationally, with details and images that would vividly describe

a foreign custom to one who has not seen it. At the end of this part of the description, however, her tone changes as she prepares the reader

for the fearful sight of the falling fire balloons. She is no longer

speaking abstractedly but, with line 21, begins to share her feelings of horror about the animals are burned and killed. When the fire falls, the animals flee the area terrified, but not before they have become

fiery imitations of the colored balloons that kill them. At this 76

point in the poem the speaker has lost all sense of detachment as she cries out against the painful scene before her.

The poem's dedication to Robert Lowell is important to note because it serves to focus, in part, the emotional and moral sense of 14 the speaker. Lowell's poetic world is filled with personal anguish and guilt and, in "The Armadillo," Bishop's quiet and often del¡cate world has become charged with emotion and pain. The armadillo, who appears only briefly near the end of the poem, becomes a symbol of the natural world that is so often cruelly and carelessly destroyed. When the armadillo raises a "weak mailed fist/clenched ignorant against the sky" (II. 39-40), it is an ineffectual gesture of defiance and also of despair. The speaker's spiritual recognition is not the triumphant one of "The Fish" but an awareness of innocent suffering.

As we have seen in these poems, Elizabeth Bishop is primarily concerned with showing the reader not just the objects of her world but also the ideas and emotions that form the basis of the speaker's relationship to them. Her tone is often deceptively detached and she appears to be merely noting aloud minor observations about the physical properties of the objects as she sees them. But in each case the observations indicate her understanding of a world which, when seen clearly, will lead to an appreciation of our relationship to it and to ourselves. By showing these objects from various angles, she invites the reader to become a part of her experience and to share her feelings.

Many critics have read the poems as only beautifully crafted descriptions and have failed to recognize the strength and moral perception of the 77 voice in them; Bishop warns against paying so much attention to detail that we miss the relationship between the world and these details.

"The Sandpiper" is a delightful poem about a poor bird rushing franti­ cally up and down the beach "in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake" (I. 4), trying desperately to "see the world in a grain of sand." Because the sandpiper stares only at the millions of colored grains, he cannot see the ocean and isequally unaware of the world around him. There is implicit in this poem a warning to the readers of

Bishop’s canon that undue attention to the specific details of the poems might obscure the moral world which these details describe. Footnotes

See Sybil Estess, "Toward the Interior: Epiphany in 'Cape Breton'

As Representative Poem," World Literature Today, 51, No. 1 (1977), 49-

52, for a detailed discussion of Bishop's poems of epiphanies.

^William Jay Smith, "GeographicaI Questions: The Recent Poetry of

Elizabeth Bishop," The Hollins Critic, 14, No. 1 (1977), 4. ^It should be noted that there are several contemporary poets who

attempt to reflect in their poetry a world that is disjointed and

surreal. Robert Bly, Bill Knott (Saint Geraud) and James Tate, for

example, often write poetry in this mode.

4Nancy L. McNally, "Elizabeth Bishop: The Discipline of Description,"

Twentieth-Century Literature, 11 (1966), 194-96, is one of the few critics who has discussed "The Monument" to any extent. She begins

her discussion by centering on the appearance of the monument which she sees as "so obviously ugly that it cannot be considered a work of art in any accepted sense." She continues with an explication of the poem'which emphasizes the worthiness of this ugly monument because of

its ability to hide "much more important non-visible meanings." McNally's continual reference to the appearance of the monument, which is only a part—and not the most important part—of the poem, causes the emphasis of her reading to shift away from the dialogue about the nature of art to a visualization of the object itself.

^In her dissertation, "A Place for the Genuine: Elizabeth Bishop and the Factual Tradition in Modern American Poetry," (Claremont, 1973), 79

Nancy Lee Bryan discusses Bishop's similarity with Wallace Stevens

in their use of the Northern Hemisphere as that of cold reality and

the Southern Hemisphere as the image of the imagination: vital,

exotic and sensual. It is interesting that in "The Imaginary Iceberg"

Bishop seems to be suggesting the reverse: the iceberg is, I ike the

soul, the symbol of the power and beauty of the imagination and the

traveler must leave its presence and journey back to the warm climates

of reaIi ty.

^Helen Vendler, "Domestication, Domesticity and the OtherworIdIy,"

. World Literature Today, 51, No. 1 (1977), 25.

^In an interview with George Starbuck, ("'The Work!' A Conversation

with Elizabeth Bishop," Ploughshares, 3, Nos. 3-4 [1977], 11-29),

Elizabeth Bishop said of "Twelve O'clock News": "Actually that poem

. . . was another that had begun years earlier. In a different ver­

sion. With rhymes, I think. Yes, I got stuck with it and finally

gave up. It had nothing to do with Viet Nam or any particular war

when I first wrote it, it was just fantasy. This is the way things

catch up with you" (p. 19). Q Ashley Brown, "An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop," Shenandoah,

17, No. 2 (1966), 10:

EB: . . . some of Herbert's poems strike me as almost surrealistic, "Love Unknown" for instance. (I was much interested in surrealism in the '30's. I also like Donne, of course, the love poems particularly, and Crashaw. But I find myself re-reading Herbert a great deaI. AS; Do you owe any of your poems to Herbert? EB: Yes, I think so. "The Weed" is modelled somewhat on 80

"Love Unknown." There are probably others.

^See James G. Southworth, "The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop,"

Co I Ieae Eng Ii sh, 20 (1959), 217, for example:

I read it as a Freudian dream, and prefer to inter­ pret it by question rather than statement. If love, why a weed and not a flower? Is it a strong sex urge that comes to disturb the "final thought" of the cold heart? Is the poet disturbed by the fact that thinking herself secure in her reason, she suddenly finds passion overthrowing reason?"

Mr. Southworth does not go any further in his discussion and leaves these unanswered questions for his reader to solve. 10|n a conversation on April 6, .1977, Bishop stated to me that this poem was written as a poem about war. She did not elaborate on what particular war or in what way the poem discussed war, nor did she speak of the religious imagery of the poem. 1 1 Jerome Mazzaro, "Elizabeth Bishop and the Poetics of Impediment,"

Salmagundi, 27 (1974), 133.

^Mazzaro, p. 133, and Wallace Fowlie, "Poetry of Silence," Common­ weal, 65 (1957), 133. l^viost of Bishop's critics speak of "The Fish" at one point or another. One of the more curious readings can be found in Nancy McNally's article:

Throughout {this poem] one's sense of the fish's unattractiveness and even unsavoriness alternates with a picture of him as a sort of decorated object, and it is this ornamental imagery which first insinuates that the fisherman is—somewhat unconventionally—a woman, which in turn suggests that part of the poem's complexity may be traced to the interplay of adventurous, even aggressive, elements in her character . . .with other more instinctively feminine reactions (p. 192). 81 1 4 'See Terry Miller, "The Prosodies of Robert Lowell," Speech

Monographs, 35 (1968), 425-34, for a discussion of "The Armadillo" in its relation to Lowell's poetry and poetic development. fa

Chapier 4: "You are one of them" Analysis of the Poems of Characters

Elizabeth Bishop's character poems describe the people who appear as a human landscape among the geographic places and metaphoric objects. To study these poems as a separate group is important, for they reveal Bishop's developing concern with the questions of identity and selfhood that establishes her as a remarkable voice within this aspect of contemporary poetry and answers those who criticize her poetry for revealing life as "more an affair of places than of people."

These poems, as the poems of places and objects examined earlier, are presented through the speaker's exploring the relationships between characters and their own landscapes and between the speaker and the people she describes. In Bishop's poetry the motif of the search or journey is obvious on a literal level by her consistent geographical references, and the places described often represent the inner land­ scape of the speaker who, by recognizing her relationship to it, can begin to find herself. But with Bishop the result of the journey is usually never explicit, and the finding is not nearly so important as the awareness that it is a process of finding that makes up our lives.

In "One Art" she emphasizes the frequency with which the found things are so easily lost again:

I have lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them but it wasn't a disaster. (II. 13-15)

bowling green univ. library 83

The statement that comes through so clearly here (and just as emphati­ cally, though less overtly, in her other poems) is that while we do

use the places, people and objects of our lives to form its geography, there cannot be a dependence on these external things for identifying the seif, for they will only change or disappear.

We have seen that Elizabeth Bishop continually presents a description which serves to illustrate the speaker's relationship to

it. The details are not important in their description of reality but in their sense of making connections between the speaker and the sub­ ject. There is usually a sense, however, that the connection cannot be truly complete. In "Chemin de Fer" the hermit's cry is ineffectual as "Across the pond an echo/tried and tried to confirm it" (II. 19-20).

The dedicated servant, "Cootchie," (in a poem of that name) is for­ gotten: "Searching the land and sea for someone else,/the lighthouse will discover Cootchie's grave/and dismiss all as trivial; the sea, desperate,/wiI I proffer wave after wave" (II. 15-18). And in

"ManueIzinho" the speaker ends by promising, probably unrealistically, to attempt to understand the gardener: "I take off my hat, unpainted/ and figurative, to you./Again I promise to try" (II. 143-45). The frequency with which the poems end in the ambiguous, rather sad note has led many critics to describe a sense of frustration of loss, or of continual searching that is implicit in Bishop's poetry. Anne

Stevenson describes the ultimate ambiguity of experience in Elizabeth

Bishop's poetry as something that is derived "not from the non- 2 existence of reality but from the utter impossibility of it." I 84 would like to re-phrase that and say that the emphasis in these poems is not on reality itself but on the characters' search for it as they struggle to find a personal reality, an identity, that could give them some meaning. The impossibility is of finding it and the struggle is all there is. It is the theme of a person's isolation from others in this struggle that is central to most of these poems. "The Man-

Moth" in his futile search is withdrawn and alien from the world of the dehumanized, cynical man. "The House Guest" is beyond the reach of anyone, "without hope, without air." "The Prodigal," shut off into a world of slime and filth, struggles to find some sense in his life.

"The Burglar of Babylon" meets his inevitable death as he tries desperately to escape. All of these characters echo Crusoe's rueful questions: "Was there/a moment when I actually chose this?/l don't remember, but there could have been" (II. 57-59, "Crusoe in England").

Since the emphasis in these poems is on the journey toward self- discovery and not on the successful end of that process, the speaker's tone is notably ambiguous and questioning, whether Bishop uses the dramatic first-person monologue (as in "The Riverman," "Crusoe in

England," "In the Waiting Room") or presents the people from the point of view of a third person observer. The narrator's relationship to the character of the poem is often confusing and, in "Faustina, or

Rock Roses," the reader is never certain where the speaker is: she observes critically and acutely the setting in the sick woman's room with the detachment of an omniscient removed recorder, yet speaks also of "the light bulb that betrays us alI,/discovering the concern/ 85

within our stupefaction" (II. 21-23). Because there is frequently

a changing or developing concept of identity within the poems, the

relationship of the speaker to the subject is also fluid. The

speaker is sure only of the search and, as in the other groups of

Bishop's poems, prefers to speak in an uncommitted and often detached

tone as she describes the characters.

In his discussion of the characteristics of post-war poets,

Stephen Stepanchev notes their "keen sense of the humor and pathos of the position of man, of the conflict between his ideals and his action, between his creative work and the imminence of his death, between his being and the encroachment of the nonlife around him."^

These are the concerns which figure in these poetic portraits.

Bishop, in common with most modern American poets, reveals the self through the disclosure of an inner landscape. The poems create their own worlds, at times even their own mythologies, as they study the people who inhabit them. Bishop is a poet of questions and skepticism, not of answers and faith, and the characters in these poems are revealed through their own (and the speakers') questioning process of self-discovery.

It is possible to trace a development in Bishop's poems about people that is not so apparent in the other groups of poems. Her awareness of the search or journey to find the self is revealed slowly by her developing concern with the process through which the search is made, and it can be readily identified throughout her various books of 86

poetry. Early poems from North and South (1946) describe people who

are not really interested in their searching for self-understanding

so much as they are interesting for what sort of human quality or

characteristic they represent ("Chemin de Fer," "The Gentleman of

Shalott," "The Man-Moth," "Cootchie"). In fact, as with the Gentleman,

it seems that for these characters they are content that "half is enough," and the speaker seems almost disillusioned in her portrayal of them. A Cold Spring (1955) contains a group of poems which deal only indirectly with a character. They are all related to forms of communication, are written in the first person, and reveal the con­ cerns of the speaker and her relationship with the persons addressed

("Four Poems," "Letter to N.Y.," "Argument," "Invitation to Miss

Marianne Moore"). Only in "Faustina, or Rock Roses," however, is there a hint of the struggle for self-discovery that becomes the central emphasis in the fictionalized autobiographical poems of

Questions of TraveI (I 965) and Geography I I I (1976). In the Braz iI poems of Questions of Travel are examples of the common people who often represent a private ("Manuelz¡nho") or public ("The Riverman") mythology of the self. These people often find their own "inner geography" to be confusing, and the speaker is even more bewildered as she explores the process of self-awareness either of these people or of herself in relation.to them ("Twelfth Morning; or, What You

Will," "The Burglar of Babylon," "The House Guest"). The family poems of Nova Scotia are also important in Bishop’s growing- interest with the study of this process as they present the experiences through 87

which the child comes to learn about her identity in relation to

the family around her ("Manners," "First Death in Nova Scotia,"

"Sestina"). The culmination of both of these strains (Brazil and

Nova Scotia—places, geography, that have literally been a source of

Bishop's identity and that now serve as a fictional catalyst for

the speaker) can be found in the poems of people in Geography III.

"Crusoe in England" is a stark portrayal of the exile who struggled

so hard to discover himself while for years he was isolated from

the world and now discovers that back in his own land he is still,

perhaps even more, an exile. "In the Waiting Room" pointedly and

forcefully questions the entire self-discovery process ("Why should

I be my aunt,/or me, or anyone?") as the young girl struggles to under­

stand her relationship to her family, to the adults in the dentist's 1 waiting room, and to the world itself via National Geographic and thé

war. By the time she wrote these poems, Bishop had become completely

involved with the process of the character as she tries to understand

what her relationship is not only to the location and place but also

to herself. Crusoe and the young girl are examples of the speaker

trying to discover the meaning of self and being finally forced to

limit that self-knowledge to the immediate awareness of what it is to

be alive on that one particular day in that one particular place.

The people who appear in the North and South volume serve pri­ marily to represent the speaker's own preoccupation with the concept that we are not terribly important and that our attempts to do something 88

about that are ineffectual. The characters are not involved much

with the journey of discovering a concept of self; even the Gentleman

of Shalott who comes the closest to being involved with the problem

of identity and sees half of himself as the mirrored image of the

other half is content to accept the odd notion and leave it at that.

His is not a realization process but merely a statement of his percep­

tion of himself. What is an important link between these poems is

the speaker's relationship to the person she is describing. In each

case she tends to stand back and analyze the characters as they

reveal idiosyncratic behavior and attitudes; rarely does she portray

fully realized character. In reading these poems, we become aware of

the sense in which each of these people represents what the speaker's

response is to a single aspect of his or her character.

"Chemin de Fer" is the only example of a first-person narrator

in the group of poems. It is written in ballad form, and the opening stanza seems to suffer under an almost sing-song nursery rhyme which

is not halted until the spondaic "scrub-pine" of line 6. And yet the rhythm fits the scene well as the speaker follows the railroad tracks to the place where the hermit lives. The rhythm of her walking

is thus interrupted when she realizes that she has reached his pond.

Although there is the sense that she is going purposely to see the hermit (found in line 2 which describes her feeling of anticipation as well as her immediate recognition of the spot and her knowledge about

"the dirty hermit"), there is not any contact between the -two of them. It is, in fact, this inability to establish contact that is 89

the theme of the poem and is illustrated with the image of the pond which lies "like an old tear/holding onto its injuries/IucidIy year after year" (II. 10-12). The pond becomes the image of a person's

unwillingness to communicate grievances and then move on to a new sort of relationship. The speaker's impression is then confirmed through the behavior of the hermit who shoots his gun (disturbing the natural things around him) and shouts "Love should be put into action" (I. 17). It is ironic that this speech is made by the hermit who has chosen to withdraw from the World of action to one of medita­ tion. The speaker also points out that the pond which has been made to represent the willful isolation of the hermit can only try vainly to conf i rm his plea.

"Chemin de Fer" is similar in many ways to "Casabianca" which is also about foolish attempts to express love. Both of these poems illustrate the speaker's reaction to the inadequacy of lives that are spent in useless behavior, and the implication seems to be that they would be less pathetic if they were able to act out their feelings in some purposeful way. But Cootchie did this, and she does not fare any better for it.

"Cootchie" is the description of a faithful servant whose life

"was spent in caring for Miss Lula, who is dear" (I. 15). Cootchie has died, and although the speaker notes the impact this will have on

Miss Lula ("who will shout and make her understand?"), she emphasizes the lack of impact of either Cootchie's life or death on anything else. The speaker's awareness of Cootchie's life as one totally used 90

in service to another is evident in her description of the relationship

between the servant and Miss Lula. And what she now realizes is that Cootchie has become totally meaningless because her mistress cannot understand her loss. Stevenson describes this poem as an example of Bishop's philosophy that a person's life is meaningful only as long as "his eye . . . sees and as his imagination interprets"; without this "he is wholly absorbed into the universe which, after he 4 is gone, continues." Certainly the speaker has made it clear through

"Cootchie" and the other two poems mentioned above that the relation­ ship of these people to their worlds is at best trivial. At the same time it is clear that for the speaker this lack of involvement is to be pitied. 5 Although the tone of voice shifts in "The Gentleman of Shalott," the speaker's attitude does not. This gentleman, in fact, epitomizes the half-lives of the other characters, but he revels in his modest solipsism while they seemed to be making pathetic attempts to find some dignity. Because he realizes his inadequacies, this gentleman is content to suppose that half of him is merely the mirrored reflec­ tion of the other half ("for why should he/be doubled?" II. 18-19).

Obviously the poem is a parody of Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" and the lives of both residents of Shalott are found to be unalterably dependent on a mirror. Unlike the lady, who attempted to leave her life of images and experience a life of reality, the gentleman is resigned to his mirror life: The uncertainty

he says he finds exhilarating. He loves that sense of constant re-adjustment. (II. 39-42)

The speaker's voice is, throughout the poem, one of wry humor, and her description is devastating only if we see it as a criticism of man's absurd fascination with himself and the pleased satisfaction with which he develops his rational perception of himself.

"The Man-Moth" has a more truly humble view of himself; although he is also aware of the absurdity and uselessness of his life, he is not flippant about his ambitions and his behavior. Bishop discovered the Man-Moth in a newspaper misprint for "mammoth" and created a surreal world for him to inhabit in the darkened city landscape. He

lives in the subways, riding backwards through underground tunnels, and only occasionally visits the surface. When he does emerge he must climb the sides of the buildings to reach the "small hole at the top of the sky" (the moon) although he knows that to reach it would mean death and that he will probably never succeed. It is not only this journey in the city which holds danger for him, however, for he is continually aware that death awaits him underground as well. The third rail of the subway (the auxiliary track with its continued live current), "the unbroken draught of poison" (I. 38), tempts him so that he must "keep/his hands in his pockets, as others must use mufflers"

(II. 39-40). And, more magically, he must also hand over his "one tear, his only possession like a bee's sting" (I. 45) to anyone who 92

sees it and claims it. His life then is a constant awareness of the

proximity of death.

The poem begins with a stanza about man, not the Man-Moth, and

Stevenson sees the poem as "the comparison between man whose shadow

'is only as big as his hat'—who is diminished by the city—and the

Man-Moth who, dehumanized and insect-like, can survive by virtue of

his dehumanization." It could be, however, that the Man-Moth is a

symbol for the ambitions of finding the meaning to life (and the con­

sequent fears that accompany such a search) that man has lost in his

unimaginative and overpowering world of urban civiIization. in this opening stanza man is described as incredibly dwarfed by the city ("he makes an inverted pin" I. 5) and as unable even to see the moon; he

is aware only of "her vast properties,/feeI ing the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold" (II. 6-7). Later, when the Man-

Moth begins his journey to the hole in the sky, man is noted in passing as having "no such illusions" (I. 22). He is indeed dehuman­

ized, an unimaginative, unseeing speck.

The Man-Moth, however, is a mysterious being whose behavior is dependent on some force outside himself. The speaker says that he

"must investigate as high as he can climb" (I. 8); "what the Man-Moth fears most he must do" (I. 23); "Each night he must/be carried through artificial tunnels and recurrent dreams" (II. 33-34). He is afraid of every aspect of his life: his ambitious journey, his dreams, the dan­ gerous third rail, his recognition of death. And yet, unl-Tke man who is also trapped by forces which diminish his power, the Man-Moth 93

struggles to continue. His climb to the moon is representative of

the continued search for an explanation to the mysteries with which we

live. Although he mistakenly assumes the moon to be a hole in the

sky, the Man-Moth is striving to discover the truth while the men around him are so caught up in daily existence that they do not even see the moon. The speaker presents the picture of the Man-Moth per­ haps, as Stevenson suggests, as a survivor who has adapted to the dehumanization of life, but because of his willingness to accept the risks of discovery (although the action terrifies him) he does not seem to be merely a surreal extension of the man described in stanza one.

The matter-of-factness with which the speaker tells of this creature lends to the ambiguity of the reader’s response. She supports the nightmare elements with so much realistic detail and description that the reader can accept the contrived sense of reality that appears in the poem. There is also a quality of sadness in the description of this Man-Moth who must behave according to some other set of rules than those which govern man. The final stanza contains fairy-tale elements of enchantment as the speaker gives instructions on what to do if a Man-Moth is caught. Like the leprechaun, when, the Man-Moth is caught he must hand over his possession, a single tear, if it is demanded of him. The implication of something with magical powers is evident in the final line which describes his tear as "cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink" (I. 48). But there is also the danger that by giving up his possession (said to be "like a 94

bee's sting") the Man-Moth will die, as the bee dies when he stings.

The speaker's ambiguity toward her subject that is so apparent

in these early poems about other people is not at all a part of the four "conversational" poems of A Cold Spring (1955). These poems share a sense of immediacy as the speaker addresses specific friends with requests and attempts to give a personal description of her feelings. The casual and genial tone of "Invitation to Miss Marianne

Moore" and "Letter to N.Y." becomes only slightly more formal in the hope explaining "the tumult in the heart" (I. I) in "Argument" and

"Four Poems."

The "Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore" is just that—a delight­ ful invitation to "please come flying" from Brooklyn. Said to be patterned loosely on Pablo Neruda's "Alberto Pojas Jiminez viene volando,"? the poem is sprinkled with Moore-like language and images

("mackerel sky," "countless little pellucid jelI ies/in cut-glass epergnes dragging with silver chains" II. 13-14). The invitation is for a day of shopping and talking, playing "at a game of constantly being wrong/with a priceless set of vocabularies" (II. 45-46). The friendly relationship between Moore and Bishop is apparent in the lists of reasons to make the trip ("The flight is safe; the weather is all arranged./The waves are running in verses this fine morning"

II. 15-17) as well as in the humorous description of Moore flying out of Brooklyn "with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots"

(I. 21), "with along unnebulous train of words" (I. 56). Jerome

Mazzaro sees "the poem's basic stoic position of a struggle toward 95

life in the face of inevitable destruction" as part of its "battle g against self-pity." Although it may be possible to arrive at this

reading, the tone of voice throughout the poem suggests a whimsical

I ight-heartedness that Mazzaro ignores. More than anything else, this

poem is a tribute to the older poet's ability to describe the most

common objects in fresh, evocative language.

This same tone is evident in "Letter to N.Y." The writer of

this letter demands in the first stanza to receive some specific

news of her friend's adventures in New York and continues in the

next four stanzas to suggest what it is her friend might be doing

"after the plays": riding through Central Park, going to parties and

leaving for home as the sun rises making the buildings look "like a

glistening field of wheat" (I. 20). That final image leads neatly

into the final stanza in which she writes:

—Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,, nevertheless I'd like to know what you are doing and where you are going. (I I. 21-24)

In both poems there is a definite and personal relationship established

between the speaker and her subject, and the reader feels privileged

to be given access to the private letters. The speaker's tone in

both poems is light and humorous, but at the same time there is an

undercurrent expression of her need for these people present in her

requests to see or hear from them, a feeling that Jerome Mazzaro

senses as an attempt to fight against self-pity. Mazzarots. insistence on reading these poems as the speaker's struggle with loneliness and 96

unhappiness seems heavy-handed since the attitude throughout the

poems does not support the emphasis.

"Argument," on the other hand, does represent the inner struggle

of the speaker who is trying to come to terms with her separation .from

a good friend, and her expression of her need for this person is not

tempered by wry images and comments as it was in the earlier poems.

The argument is between Days (who add separate experiences which, "can­

celing each other’s experience" El- 18], cannot be shared), Distance

(who puts more and more space between the two) and the persona who

tries to fight against the damage time and separation can do to the

relationship. The argument is constant and ultimately futile (they

"argue argue argue with me/endI ess Iy/neither proving you less wanted

nor less dear" II. 5-7), for the speaker will not agree that the

friendship is no longer possible. She assumes that time and space can

be conquered and the relationship reestablished:

Days and Distances disarrayed again and gone both for good and from the gentle battleground. (II. 26-28)

There is ambivalence, though, about whether she does indeed believe

that the separation is temporary. The tone is one of sadness and

discouragement when she describes the limits of the Distance between

them: "stretching indistinguishabIy/aI I the way,/alI the way to where my reasons end" (II. 12-14), Days as those printed on a calendar

"Compliments of Never & Forever, Inc." (I. 21). The reader is left

with the understanding that the speaker is not sure herself of how

possible the reunion could be. 97'

"Four Poems" is also very personal and describes four attempts

by the speaker to accept the loss of a love relationship. Each of the

four poems ends with the same uncertainty, the same feeling that there

is really little chance that this is not the end. Each poem suggests a way in which contact between the two has been made, and each attempt has been unsuccessful. Stevenson complains that these poems are too personal, made up of private symbols which do not permit the 9 reader to share the experience. And yet the key to the reader’s

response may be found in Wallace Fowlie's comment that they are love poems whose focus is "not on the experience of love as much as on 'The tumult in the heartThe reader is told of the struggle of the speaker to understand her emotional distress as she first describes it analytically in "Conversation," then imagistically in the dream-like

images of "Rain Towards Morning," then experientially in "While

Someone Telephones," and finally in'terms of their physical relation­ ship in "0 Breath." Each poem describes the failure of its method to establish some positive explanation for the speaker's struggle with her feelings and ends in a tone of uncertainty. The speaker finds only

something that maybe I could bargain with and make a separate peace beneath within is never with. (II. 13-15)

What is striking about this group of poems from A Cold Spring is not that the speaker hesitates to say clearly and unequivocally what her feelings are (for we have come to expect ambiguities in the speaking voice of Bishop's poems), but that they are as close to 98

personal statements as they are. .Although the feelings may be obscured

by humor or "private symbols," they are the most overtly expressed in

Bishop's canon. This is due primarily to the fact that these poems depart from Bishop's usual pattern of presenting the speaker's voice through her description of some place, object or person and her rela­ tionship to that subject. The basis of these poems is the relationship between the speaker and her audience as she tries to express her need to understand her feelings about that relationship. The poems are also important in that they introduce an almost confessional tone in

Bishop's poetry as the speaker describes her inner battles and the reader watches the emotional struggle almost voyeuristicaI Iy. This move into a confessionaI istic mode is also apparent in the use of autobio­ graphical elements to create the fictive world of the poems. Prior to A Cold Spring Bishop had limited the use of her own life experiences to her fiction (most notably in "The Baptism," 1937, and "In the

Village," 1953). In her later volumes of poetry she begins to draw on her childhood in Nova Scotia and her Brazilian experiences as a source from which to write her poetry.

"Faustina, or Rock Roses" is an example of this new interest in using elements of her life in the poetry'' as well as an important beginning to the study of self-identity that becomes central to

Bishop's later poems. The picture is of two women—a frail white woman who whispers to herself and the purposeful black servant with a

"sinister kind face" (I. 60) who takes care of her—and a visitor who only observes the scene but is, with the speaker, exposed by the 99 eighty-watt bulb which reveals the picture. The structure of the poem reinforces the details of the scene while it raises doubts about the vaildity of those appearances. It begins with a description of the room which mirrors the madness of its occupant by its disarranged, chipped, sagging and confusing "clutter of trophies." Images of whiteness associated with the crazy woman culminate in the ragged garments "each contributing its/shade of white, confusing/and undaz­ zling" (II. 40-42) which are draped around the room. The poem describes the relationship of this confusion to the characters in the room and to the visitor who is both separate from the speaker (the visitor is always spoken of in the third person) and, at the same time, identifiable with her. The spectator-speaker moves from being an ob­ server to being involved with the action of the poem in a bewildering way: "The visitor sits and watches . . . /Meanwhile the eighty-watt bulb/betrays us all" (II. 16, 20-21). By its suggestion that appear­ ances themselves are at best only ambiguous and cannot supply any answers, this shifting focus emphasizes the questions that the speaker

(and/or visitor?) later asks: is madness ultimate peace or terror?

The response to her question is given in the final stanza: "There is no way of tel ling./The eyes say only either" (II. 78-79).

Although the title would indicate that the poem is primarily about the servant Faustina, it is instead the visitor who is central to understanding the poem. Her relationship to the speaker is ambiguous because of the shifting pronoun reference, but it is this inconsistency that creates the emotional tension of the poem. At once 100

removed and involved, she watches the relationship between the woman

and Faustina, almost detached from the scene but then is immediately

forced to exclaim on her own feelings about madness: "is it/freedom

at last . . . /Or is it the very worst,/the unimaginable nightmare/

that never before dared last/more than a second?" (II. 63-68). Her

question becomes alive:

forks instantly and starts a snake-tongue flickering; blurts further, blunts, softens, separates, falls, our problems becoming helplessly pro I i ferat ive. (II. 72-77)

The visitor/speaker's question is crucial because there can be no answer to it. Her relationship with the sick woman (since she is

visiting and bringing flowers we can assume they were friends)

indicates the need for her to believe that madness is a peaceful, secure state and Faustina's service and protection could support that answer. However, the description of the "crazy house" and the bare, desperate room leads to the assumption that it is a nightmare.

Faustina is said to be sinister as well as kind and presents "a cruel bIack/coincident conundrum" (II. 61-62). The crazy woman herself cannot answer and so "There is no way of telling." The speaker with­ draws again to the role of observer and the visitor, a separate character again, gives the roses and leaves the sickroom. There is no resolution to the conflicts and tension in the poem: the woman is mad and responds to nothing beyond her most basic needs; Faustina is I 0 I

both solicitous and hostile toward her patient, "complaining of, exp I aining,/the terms of her employment" (II. 57-58); the visitor is never really excluded or involved with the others and leaves the room awkwardly, confused and wondering. instead, the poem ends with a tone of helplessness as the speaker suggests that it is only our impression I 2 of the appearance of things that we know. The speaker in "Faustina, or Rock Roses" tries to understand the characters in the portrait both as an observer and as a participator and finally must leave without having her questions answered. She has not really attempted to define her relationship to these women or tried to discover her own identity.

She merely moves in and out of the scene trying to find some assurance.

In the later poems of Geography I I I (1976) the attempts to fix the self into the moment and setting of the poem are more successful.

Before reaching that point, however, Bishop first explores her con­ cepts of the self as they are revealed through experiences in Brazil and Nova Scotia.

It is particularly true of the Brazil poems of Questions of

Travel (1965) and Comp Iete Poems (1969) that the speaker is dependent only on her impressions of the people she encounters. Because the cul­ ture and life styles are foreign to her, she must rely on her reactions to what her perceptions of the people are as she tries to understand her own relationship to them. Initially disappointed or surprised by the civilization (or lack of it), the tourist in "Arrival at Santos" is defensive about the response the new country affords her: 102

is this how this country is going to answer you

and your immodest demands for a different world, and a better life, and complete comprehension of both at last, and immediately, after eighteen days of suspension? (II. 8-12)

She warns her fellow passenger to watch out for boat hooks and hopes that "the customs officials will speak English . . . /and leave us our bourbon and cigarettes" (II. 30-31). She is often defensive as she describes the strange and confusing behavior of its people who live a simple life which baffles the speaker by its mixture of artless ness and mystery. In her attempts to understand them, her response seems almost ingenuous, as when she pleads with the "House Guest":

Please! Take our money! Smile! . What on earth have we done? What has everyone done and when did it all begin? (II. 42-45)

"House Guest" is about a "sad seamstress/who stays with us this month" (II. 1-2). She is despondent and no attempt of the speaker to provide her with necessities, surprises or entertainment can shake her forlorn acceptance of her unhappiness. The tone of the poem is witty as the speaker describes the varied approaches she makes to the seamstress:

She speaks: "I need a little money to buy buttons." She seems to think it’s useless to ask. Heavens, buy buttons, if they'll do any good, the biggest in the world— by the dozen, by the gross! Buy yourself an ice cream, a comic book, a car! (II. 27-35) 103

And even when the source of the problem is discovered to be her

family's refusal to allow her to enter the convent, the speaker seems

flippant in her suggestion that they take her to one: "wasn't her month up last week, anyway?" The speaker ends the poem with the speculation that perhaps she has hired Clotho, one of the Fates, who has been

"sewing our lives . . . and our fates will be like hers,/and our hems crooked forever" (II. 28-29). The speaker remains amused by the idio­ syncrasies of her seamstress and almost detached from the problems that produce her behavior. In spite of the humor, however, there is also

in the poem a more serious awareness of the hopelessness of the seam­ stress's life, a hopelessness that becomes the central force in the ballad "The Burglar of Babylon."

"The Burglar of Babylon" developed from a newspaper account that

Bishop changed only slightly'^ and tells the story of the outlaw

Micucu (defined in a footnote as the "folk name of a deadly snake") as he is hunted down and killed by the police and soldiers on the hili of Babylon outside Rio. Although the ballad appears to be a straight­ forward account of the unavoidable death of Micucu, the speaker often makes witty jabs at the ineffectuality of the law, the complacency of the rich and the incomoetence of the lawless. Micucu represents the poor people who have come to Rio to earn money and are resigned to live in poverty and squalor on the hills surrounding the city, but he is not a folk hero. The people sometimes watch the hills for a glimpse of the chase, but their lives are not interrupted by the out­ law's struggle to stay alive. They know, as he does, that his attempt 104

to escape is futile. Micucu's auntie "who raised him like a son" does

not understand why he became a criminal and her customers wonder why

he was such a poor burglar ("He got caught six times—or more" I. 172).

The speaker suggests only that both his lawlessness and his ineptitude

were inevitable. "The Burglar of Babylon" is a character poem in the

same tradition of the earlier poems of North and South. Micucu repre­

sents a class of people whose existence is marked by its unchanging

hopelessness. The poem ends with another manhunt as the soldiers search

for two more criminals, "but they say they aren’t as dangerous/As the

poor Micucu" (II. 179-80), and the final stanzas repeat the opening

motif of the stain of poverty that spreads over the hills of Rio.

Micucu, like the House Guest, has accepted his hopelessness, and the

speaker has chosen only to record the conditions of his desperate and useless attempts to escape from what he knows is inevitable. She

is not concerned with the effect that his life may have on her own (as she is in "Manuelz¡nho") or with the inner struggle that a person has

in determining and accepting his fate (as in "The Riverman").

"ManueIzinho" has been described as both "a paradigm of the I 4 Brazilian character” and "a shiftless South American vegetation god" who "exists entirely in the commonplace world of the planter and crops." He is a pleasant, though surely incompetent, servant whose faults are innumerated by his exasperated and confused employer. She attempts to understand the expectations and behavior of her gardener

in the hope that she will then be able to establish a relationship 105 between them that is less frustrating to her. The poem is a monologue addressed to Manuelzinho and begins with an explanation of what the speaker sees as their roles: he is "supposed/to supply me with vege­ tables,/but you don't; or you won't; or your can't/get the idea through your brain—/the world's worst gardener since Cain" (II. 3-7).

Although his gardens are colorful and, for a time, promising,

Manuelzinho is helpless to avert the disasters caused by the umbrella ants or the week of rain. Throughout the poem the speaker refers to his bad luck which follows her gardener as an explanation for his unquestioning acceptance of what cannot be changed:

The strangest things happen to you. Your cow eats a "poison grass" and drops dead on the spot. Nobody else's does. (II. 50-53)

Yet there is the continual hint that she is very aware that much of his behavior is not entirely accidental. Because he assumes the role of helpless incompetence, Manuelzinho manages to get more seeds to plant ("imported, guaranteed,/and eventually you bring me/a mystic three-legged carrot,/or a pumpkin 'bigger than the baby"'); more money for his father's funeral:

I give you money for the funeral and you go and hire a bus for the delighted mourners, so I have to hand over some more and then have to hear you tell me you pray for me every night! (II. 63-68)

He is given more money for medicine because he approaches his employer

"sniffing and shivering,/hat in hand, with that wistful/face . . . / I 06

improvident as the dawn" (li. 70-72, 74). His attempts to settle

their accounts lead to "immediate confusion"—

You've left out the decimal points. Your columns stagger, honeycombed with zeros. You whisper conspiratoria I I y ; the numbers mount to millions. Account books? They are Dream Books. In the kitchen we dream together how the meek sha I I inherit the earth— or several acres of mine. (II. 86-94)

She knows that he manipulates her into providing more than she should

and is amused by the behavior of both of them.

What is essential to understanding their relationship is the

awareness the speaker has of her isolation from the world that is his.

She is unsuccessful even in making friends with his children and each

attempt to bridge the distance between them is destined to fail because of thei-r wariness with each other. He is unaware of her presence as

she watches him make paths on her property or stand staring into the

fog and space. The consistent refrain is her bewilderment at his inex­

plicable behavior which she humorously decides as perhaps magical:

And once I yelled at you so loud to hurry up and fetch me those potatoes your holey hat flew off, you jumped out of your clogs, leaving three objects arranged in a triangle at my feet, as if you'd been a gardener in a fairy tale all this time and at the word "potatoes" had vanished to take up your work of fairy prince somewhere. (II. 38-49) 107

Because she lives in such a separate world from that of her gardener, the speaker finds in his behavior a source for amusement. She describes his patched clothes as blueprints, outlined by white thread, and specu­

lates on why he continues to paint the brim of his straw hat with garish colors ("perhaps when you were smalI,/your mother said,

'Manuelzinho,/one thing: be sure you always/paint your straw hat'"

(II. 130-33). Her amusement with ManueIzinho's appearance and behavior is tempered with affection and tenderness, and she apologizes for not always recognizing his pride and dignity. Nancy Lee Bryan suggests that the poem is not only a product of the speaker's alienated condi­ tion but is also the revelation of it.'^ When, at the end of the poem, the speaker decides that she will continue trying to understand her gardener, she admits that she has not been successful in avoiding the sense of superiority that is reflected by her amusement, and she feels that it is her responsibility to try again. The poem ends with this promise, but there is no assurance that her isolation from his way of life can be altered by just saying the words. The speaker and

Manuelzinho will continue to be cautious, though friendly, as they attempt to accept each other.

Manuelzinho represents the commonplace world of the Brazilian interior and has none of the exotic and supernatural elements that are found in "The Riverman." A headnote to this poem explains that the details of the riverman's initiation into the spiritual world of the sacacas (witch doctors) came from Charles Wagley's book, Amazon

Town.The poem is, like the rituals of the religion, a mixture of ¡08 the fantastic with the common. Because the poem is a dramatic mono­

logue spoken by the riverman, it has a matter-of-fact tone which contrasts sharply with its descriptions of a magical, supernatural world. The riverman describes how he has been chosen by the Dolphin to journey under the Amazon River to meet the serpent-goddess

Luandinha who teaches him the power of the sacaca. There is never any doubt that the riverman is accepting a fate that has selected him:

I got up in the night for the Dolphin spoke to me

The Dolphin singled me out; Luandinha seconded it. (II. 1-2; 157-58)

But he is also a practical man who realizes the usefulness of having magical powers:

Why shouldn't I be ambitious? I sincerely desire to be a serious sacaca like Fortunato Pombo or Lucia, or even the great Joaquim Sacaca. (II. 102-07)

And the river becomes the symbol of both the magical and the practical in the riverman's life:

Look, it stands to reason that everything.we need can be obtained from the river.

one just has to know how to find it. (I I. 108-10; I 17)

When the riverman first enters the water after the Dolphin he is led into a giant castle in the river. His house and family on shore become insignificant in comparison to the high life of the river 109

spirits. His world of reality becomes less attractive the more fre­

quently he visits the world of the river gods. The strangeness of

performing the everyday rituals of drinking and smoking at the bottom

of the river impresses him, but this imaginative and magical world

remains alien to him. Although he longs to become a part of it, he

remains an outsider—unable even to speak or understand the magical

language of the gods. His experiences in the river every moonlit

night have led him to adopt the life style of the river magician:

I don't eat fish any more. There is fine mud on my scalp and I know from smelling my comb that the river smells in my hair. My hands and feet are cold. I look yellow... (II. 59-64)

but his development as a sacaca is based more on his personal ambition

than on his convictions. The supernatural religion begins to make

demands on him and he struggles to do all that it requires of him,

although finding "a virgin mirror/no one's ever looked at" is proving

to be difficult. He is someone who believes that by following the

religious instructions of his mentors he will gain personal power, glory and dignity although he never clearly states or understands what his job as a sacaca will be. His promise to his neighbors at the end of the poem ("I will go to work/to get you health and money"

II. 155-56) seems almost an obligatory explanation for why he should be permitted to boast about his new-found association with the river gods.

"ihe Riverman," like "The Burglar of Babylon" and "Manueli inho," I ¡0

illustrates the human concern Bishop has developed in her poems. These people, to varying degrees, see themselves in relation to the forces which dictate their behavior. None of them is an example of self- determination, for each is acted upon by forces or fates of supernatura powers that influence his actions. Yet each retains a dignity and self-awareness that indicates an understanding of his relationship to his world. Unlike Micucu, whose death is as predictable as were his futile attempts to survive, Manuelzinho seems able to manipulate his misfortunes to his advantage, forcing his employer by his complacent acceptance of his life to provide him with more than she had intended.

"The Riverman," on the other hand, revels in his acceptance of a spiritual calling "I thought once of my wife,/but I knew what I was doing" II. 30-31). He has found a way of life that not only reinforces his ambitious desire for prestige but will also give him a supernatural power that can authenticate his pride.

These poems are important in that they show the growing concern for the character whose awareness of himself, his "inner geography," is mirrored by his everyday behavior. While there are many ways in which the exotic, fantasy-life of the Man-Moth or the Gentleman of

Shallot can be compared to the magic of the riverman or the impracti­ cal ity of Maneulzinho, the essential difference is that there is now the added dimension of the character's sense of himself as identified by the necessities of his life. The tone of voice in these poems is one of affection for characters who are struggling to discover how they can best use what they know of themselves. It is not the same purely observant narrator whose feelings were often obscured by the

descriptions. The speaker is more willing to risk admitting what she

feels through her revelations of the characters.

In the few Nova Scotia poems there is also the developing sense

of the speaker coming to understand herself through her relation to the

world of the poem. "First Death in Nova Scotia" describes how a child

was introduced to the fact of death by describing her impressions

through a series of stark images. The tight construction of the poem

develops carefully as each image leads naturally into the next while

her memory of the scene reveals it. The first stanza describes the

cold parlor in which are the body of dead Arthur, the old chromographs

of the royal family, and a stuffed loon "shot and stuffed by Uncle/

Arthur, Arthur's father" (II. 9-10). The loon becomes the subject of

the second stanza; it is silent, white and cold and these adjectives

relate it to the coldness of the parlor and the whiteness of Arthur

and his coffin, the subject of the next two stanzas. When the child

is lifted up by her mother to view the body, she thinks that the coffin resembles a frosted cake and Arthur a small unpainted doll.

What she remembers is the whiteness and the coldness ("Jack Frost had

started to paint him/. . .and then/. . .had dropped the brush/and

left him white, forever" II. 34, 38-40). In the final stanza she

imagines that the royal couples might be inviting Arthur to join them

in their warm court, but she knows that he cannot go there for "his

eyes EareJ shut up so tight/and the roads EareJ deep in snow" (II.

49-50). I ¡2

The child's memories are stated in the matter-of-fact tone that we have come to expect in Bishop's poetry, and there is even the casual

reference to the Canadian flag when she describes Jack Frost painting

"the Maple Leaf (Forever)" (I. 36). Both of these elements, as well as.the careful image pattern, help to alleviate the almost sentimental scene of the child's death. But there is a heavy-handedness in the description of the child's studied reactions to her cousin's death.

It is as important to the child that the room contained a stuffed loon and a picture of two royal couples as it is that Arthur's body was laid out in it. She related the three objects not only by the white images of stillness and coldness but also with the repeated images of red: the loon's "eyes were red glass,/much to be desired" (II. 19-20),

"the gracious royal couples/were warm in red and ermine" (II. 41-42), and Arthur's whiteness was tempered by Jack Frost's having just begun to paint "on his hair,/a few red strokes" (II. 37-38). It is clear that the child, as the speaker recalls the experience, remembers no feelings other than a sort of numbness evident by the continual references to the images of coldness, snow and whiteness. In fact the child is almost totally passive as the speaker describes her memories of being lifted up to see Arthur (and then remarking that he was small and white) and being given "one lily of the valley/to put in Arthur's hand" (II. 25-26). The chi Id is aware of the finality of death (as the last stanza indicates), and her personal introduction to death in her family has created in her a sense of her own need to place the experience into a remembrance of the scene itself rather I I 3 I 8 than a description of its emotional effect. Mazzaro speaks to this technique in Bishop's poetry by saying that "life's final uncertainty and the sometimes self-pitying acceptance of annihilation demand an emphasis on experience as the only reality and a special willingness by readers to accept the often against-the-grain nature of that experience. 20 Ihe experience described in "Manners" is much lighter and happier than that of "First Death in Nova Scotia," but it must also struggle against the accusation of sentimentality. In the poem the speaker recalls an incident when her grandfather taught her to "be sure to remember to always/speak to everyone you meet" (II. 3-4) and

"Always offer everyone a ride;/don't forget that when you get older"

(II. 11-12). She then remembers the many attempts they made to practice this code of good manners in a playful series of offering rides and shouting greetings:

When the automobiles went by, the dust hid the people's faces, but we shouted, "Good day! Good day! Fine day!" at the top of our voices. (II. 25-28)

"In the Waiting Room" is the culmination of Bishop’s poems about her memories of a childhood world (to date) and most clearly presents the journey toward self-discovery as it is revealed through a child's experience. In this poem she, as a seven-year-old girl, seriously questions her identity after she hears (and participates in) her aunt's scream of pain. Unlike her mother's scream in the story

"In the Village" (which is a troubling experience but one from which I 14

she could remove herself), the scream in the dentist's office becomes

the impetus for her realization that she is a part of the larger con­

text of all human life. Until the time of her aunt's scream, the

girl has been sitting in a waiting room "full of grown-up people,/

arctics and overcoats,/1 amps and magazines" (II. 8-10). She was 21 reading in the National Geographic and looking at the pictures of

black volcanoes "spilling over/in rivulets of fire" (II. 19-20), of

"a dead man slung on a pole" (I. 24), of "babies with pointed heads/ wound round and round with wire/I ike the necks of light bulbs" (II.

26-28). These pictures revealed a universal world of death and suf­

fering that embarrassed and fascinated her, but it was a world that was not related to her in any way.

Suddenly, from inside, came an oh! of pain —Aunt Consuelo's voice— not very loud or long. I wasn't at all surprised; even then I knew she was a foolish, timid woman. I might have been embarrassed, but wasn't. What took me completely by surprise was that it was me: my voice, in my mouth. Without thinking at all I was my fool ish aunt, I—we—were falling, falling,, our eyes glued to the cover of the NationaI Geograph ic, February, 1913. (II. 36-53)

The young girl becomes so unnerved by her sudden recognition that she

•is a part of the pain of the adult, "other" world, that she begins to

lose her sense of physically being in the particular time and place of the waiting room. To keep from giving into "the sensation of falling off/the round, turning world/into cold, blue-black space" (II. 57-59), the girl begins to concentrate on the details of her self. In a sort of incantation of identity she reiterates the facts of her life: in

"three days/you'll be seven years old" (II. 54-55); "you are an I,/ you are an Eli zabeth,/you are one of them" (II. 60-62). The movement of this litany is from the very personal "I" which is how she identifies herself to herself, to the more formal "Elizabeth" which is how she is referred to by others, to the even more removed "one of them" which relates her to all the other people who suffer in this world. The girl is confused by this sudden realization and tries desperately to understand herself in relation to the people and objects in the room.

She feels that somehow by seeing herself in this particular place at this precise moment she will be able to understand this "unlikely" relationship that she has discovered she has with the rest of humanity. t As she struggles to establish her place with the others, she asks a series of questions that have become crucial to her:

Why should I be my aunt, or me, or anyone? What similarities * • • held us a I I together or made us alI just one?

how had I come to be here, like them, and overhear a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn't? (II. 75-77, 82-83, 86-89) I 16

But instead of answers she finds herself fighting to keep from

"siiding/beneath a big black wave,/another, and another" (II. 91-93).

When she finally comes "back in it," she is only sure of the external

and observable details of her life:

The War was on. Outside, in Worcester, Massachusetts, . were night and slush and cold, and it was still the fifth of February, 1918. (II. 95-99)

The speaker's insistence on understanding her identity through an essential awareness of where she is, is consistent with the geograph­

ical motif of most of Bishop's poetry and corroborates Robert Martin’s observation that the emphasis in her question, "How had I come to be 22 here," is on the "here" and not the "how." As with so many of

Bishop's poems, the speaker can explain herself only by revealing the details of the situation around her; she cannot know any more than that.

Just as the young girl "In the Waiting Room" stabilized herself by reiterating the objects and people which surrounded her, so Crusoe tries to understand the worth of his life in relation to both his

island experience and his new life as a returned exile. "Crusoe in

England" is a dramatic monologue in which an aged Robinson Crusoe, stranded on another island of as much isolation and bewilderment as his earl ier "un-rediscoverabIe, un-renamabIe" one, talks about the unhappiness and confusion of his exile.

It is the discovery of a new island being born that triggers 117

Crusoe's recollections of his solitary survival on his ugly, desolate

island of dead volcanoes and "left-over clouds." He complains that

"the island smelled of goat and guano," and finds that the presence of the gulls, goats and turtles was of no comfort:

The questioning shrieks, the equivocal replies over a ground of hissing rain and hissing, ambulating turtles got on my nerves. (II. 107-10)

His appreciation of the variegated beaches in "marbled colors" and the beautiful waterspouts, "glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated,/ sacerdotal beings of glass" (II. 51-52), did not make his isolation any more tolerable. This Crusoe does not have the puritan optimism 23 of Defoe's hero and often gave way to self-pity:

"Do I deserve this? I suppose I must. I wouldn't be here otherwise. Was there a moment when I actually chose this? I don't remember, but there could have been." (II 56-59)

And he justifies this indulgence by deciding that '"Pity should begin at home.' So the more/pity I felt, the more I felt at home" (II. 63-64).

It is his feeling of isolation that is the most unbearable, but each attempt to alleviate it seems doomed to fail because he "didn't know enough." When he tried quoting Wordsworth to his iris-beds of snail shells, he could not remember the word "solitude" that would complete the line, perhaps because for Crusoe solitude meant loneli­ ness instead of the Wordsworthian concept of peace and bliss. He experimented with dyeing the baby goat bright red ("just to see/some- thing a little different" II. 126-27) but then its mother would not I 18

recognize it. He tried to make his island bearable by creating home­ made implements and industries: an "awful, stinging" home-brew, a

flute with "the weirdest scale on earth." Crusoe serves as an example of man as maker. His world is one in which he has had to re-make or create the elements around him as well as give names to all the unusual things around him. Through this creative process and by dancing and whooping with the goats he is able to keep from going crazy in his

isolation.

But he is haunted by the nightmares of violence and of

other islands stretching away from mine, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands, like frogs’ eggs turning into polIiwogs of islands, knowing that I had to live on each and every one, eventually, for ages . . . (II. 34-40)

This frantic sense that it could be his fate to be exiled on an unending series of islands is stressed by the repetition of the word "islands" which is a symbol of his isolation. When he has almost resigned him­ self to this life of despair, Friday appears and eases the immense burden of his loneliness. But in his recollection of his experiences,

Crusoe does not dwell long on the time of Friday's companionship; within the same stanza they are rescued and he is alone again on another island. The tone of dejection is certainly predominant in his .24 description of life as a solitary and isolated struggle for survival.

Back in England ("another island,/that doesn't seem like one, but who decides?" II. 54-55), Crusoe finds that he is bored and tired of the country he had longed for during his years of exile. "The living soul 119

has dribbled away" (I. 69), and there is no longer any meaning to his

life. He is as obsolete and useless as the relics that the museum now

wants to display. Crusoe ends his monologue in a tone of regret and

despair with the almost off-hand comment: "and Friday, my dear Friday,

died of measIes/seventeen years ago come March" (II. 81-82).

As with so many of Bishop's characters, it is his struggle with

the pain of loss and isolation that has given structure to Crusoe’s

life. It was the "home-made" equipment he invented for survival that

defined his existence on the island: "The knife thereon the shelf—/

it reeked of meaning, I ike a crucifix./ It lived" (II. 61-63). Now

these objects are unnecessary and, by implication, so is he: "but

that archipelago/has petered out. I'm old" (II. 57-58). He must try

to understand himself through the place where he finds himself but,

like the others, he accepts this reality with a sense of hopelessness

and regret.

The movement in Bishop's poems about people has been that of a

journey toward self-discovery. In her earlier poems the characters

are seen as almost static beings whose identities are revealed in

terms of the settings of the poems. The discovery process described

is one in which the speaker suggests her. own reactions to the charac­

ter's present status; it is not a process through which the character must come to some knowledge of himself. For example, "Manuelzinho"

is described as he is, in many settings and through many interesting anecdotes, but as a character he does not develop; it is the speaker who reveals her reactions to him through relating her experiences with 120

him. Bishop's concern in her later poems about people is quite dif­

ferent. Both the girl in the waiting room and Crusoe come to a self- awareness through their experiences. In a sense, they are revealed to themselves as much as to the reader. The speaker in these two poems

is a first person narrator who is obviously more intimately involved with the self-revelation than the more distanced voice of the third person narrator who merely describes her observations of a separate person. Bishop's emphasis has shifted noticeably not only in the per­ son of the narrator, but also in her perception of the development of the character's self-awareness. ill

Footnotes

^Herbert Leibowitz, "The Elegant Maps of Elizabeth Bishop," rev.

of Geography III, by Elizabeth Bishop, New York Times Book Review,

February 6, 1977, p. 21. There has been remarkably little attention

given to this group of poems by Elizabeth Bishop's critics. While

there have been certain favorites of this group (the much anthologized

"The Man-Moth," for example), the poems as vehicles for self-discovery,

has been largely ignored. This may be partly due to the expectation of

the critics who read Bishop as an academic or formalist poet and there­

fore do not consider the almost confessional tone and expression found

in these poems. There will be a more careful consideration of this element in the Bishop canon in the final chapter of this study. 2 Anne Stevenson, Eli zabeth Bi shop (New York: Twayne, 1966), p. 117. ^Stephen Stepanchev, "Elizabeth Bishop," in American Poetry Since

1945: A Critical Survey (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 3. 4 Stevenson, p. 105. 5 James G. Southworth's reading of this poem in "The Poetry of

Elizabeth Bishop" (Co I Iege Eng Ii sh, 20 [1959], 216-17) should be mentioned

if only for its amusing insight into one aspect of twentieth-century criticism. He describes the poem as an example of "love in reverse" and says that "this is an ironic portrait of a man who is anxious to complete himself through a woman, but, having narcissistic qualities

(he is probably a homosexual), tries to rationalize his inability."

Freud has must to answer for. ^Stevenson, pp. 82-83. J 22

Jerome.Mazzaro, in "Elizabeth Bishop and the Poetics of Impedi­

ment" (SaImagundi, 27 [1974], 138-39), suggests that as Neruda saw "the

dead Jimenez come flying on one of the paper birds that it was the

hobby of dead writers to construct," so Bishop sees Moore flying out of

Brooklyn ("where the poet is 'buried'") over the '"live world' of the

East River" to visit.

^Mazzaro, p. 139.

^See Stevenson's discussion of "Rain Towards Morning," p. 87.

'^Wallace Fowlie, "Poetry of Silence," CommonweaI ? 65 (1957), 516.

^Elizabeth Bishop's mother suffered a breakdown after her husband's death in 1911 (when Bishop was eigth months old) and, except for a brief visit home in 1916 (the impetus for the story, "In the Village"), was kept in a mental hospital until her death in 1934. Whether "Faustina, or Rock Roses" is the description of an actual experience is not, in this study, significant; what is important is that Bishop has created a poetic construct from a personal source. 12 Stevenson, p. 109.

13Ashley Brown, "An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop," Shenandoah, 17,

No. 2 (1966), 19.

'^Nancy Lee Bryan, "A Place for the Genuine: Elizabeth Bishop and the Factual Tradition in Modern American Poetry," Diss. Claremont 1973, p. 173.

'^Crale D. Hopkins, "Inspiration as Theme: Art and Nature in the

Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop," Arizona Quarterly, 32 (1966), 207.

'^Bryan, p. 176. 123

* ^CharIes Wag Iey, Amazon Town: ,A Study of Man i n the Trop i cs

(New York: Knopf, 1964). All of the book is interesting in view of

Bishop's poems about the places and people.of Brazil, but it is

chapter 7, "From Magic to Science," that provides the information for

"The Riverman." 18 See Helen Vendler's discussion of this poem in "Domestication,

Domesticity, and the Otherworldly," World Literature Today, 51, No. 1

(1977), 24.

^Mazzaro, p. 140.

2D In a conversation on April 6, 1977, Bishop mentioned to me that this poem, "pure whimsy," was included in the collection because it pleased her family who said it was an exact description of her grand­ father: "just like him."

^George Starbuck, "'The Work!' A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop,"

Ploughshares, 3, Nos. 3-4 (1977), 17.

^Robert K. Martin, "Taking the World for What It Is," rev. of

Geography III, by Elizabeth Bishop, Christopher Street (1977), p, 52. ^^Starbuck, p. 18.

^David Kai stone, in "Questions of Memory—New Poems by Elizabeth

Bishop," Ploughshares, 2, No. 4 (1975), 178, describes Crusoe's "joy in the home-made" and his excitement at being able to re-invent the world as being the key to the poem. He believes that what Crusoe feared most in

England was the nightmare "that such stimulation, imaginative curiosity and energy will peter out." Chapter 3: Elizabeth Bishop and Twentieth-Century Poetry: A Cone I us ion

Although she has been frequently honored through the receipt of

poetry prizes and recognized as a "good poet" by her peers, Elizabeth

Bishop has always remained outside the many "schools" of modern and contemporary poetry. She herself ascribes this to her lack of geo­ graphical stability:

I've gone up and down the East Coast . . . living everywhere from Nova Scotia to Key West, but I've never seemed to live long enough in one place to become a member of a poetry "group," and when I was in Brazil there weren't any groups handy. I've been a friend of Marianne Moore's and Robert Lowell’s but not a part of any school.!

It is in keeping with her predilection for travel and geography that she would see her inability to find a "place" in the mainstream of modern American poetry as dependent on where she happened to be living.

Bishop is correct in realizing that she has successfully avoided the easy (and usually limiting) classifications that have been bestowed on many of her contemporaries by critics and reviewers; however, she is an important link in contemporary poetry between the modern "objectivist" poets (whom she admired and, in her early books, was influenced by) and the diversity of the contemporary poets in their experimentation with voice, autobiography and poetic stance (surreal, political, confessional, etc.). For, although she does remain apart from the major currents in contemporary poetry, she certainly has been influenced by and influences the directions of twentieth century American poetry.

At the very beginning of the twentieth century, American poetry consisted primarily of genteel, innocuous poems—rhetorical statements 125

of "high seriousness," written in conventional, established verse 2 forms. It was in reaction to this poetry (of Richard Henry Stoddard,

Thomas Bailey Aldrich,. WiI I iam Vaughn Moody, among others) that the early modern American poets revolted. With the inception of Harriet

Mon roe's Poetry, A. Magaz i ne of Verse (1912) and the deveIopment of the

Imagist movement in modern poetry (ca. 1908-1914), American poets began to realize new potentials for their writing. In as dramatic a break with poetic traditions as the publication of Lyri caI Ball ads (1798), F. S. Flint's "Imagism"^ and Ezra Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste"

4 (1913) established what was then a totally new emphasis for the poetic process: direct treatment of subject ("thing”) of the poem, absolute avoidance of any extraneous words, and the attempt to use

"rhythm of the musical phrase, not the metronome." Both Harriet Monroe and the I magists (who found a voice in her magazine) encouraged

American poets to write the "new poetry," which Monroe described as striving

for a concrete and immediate realization of life; it would discard the theory, the abstraction, the remoteness, found in all classics not of the first order. It is less vague, less verbose, less eloquent, than most poetry of the Victorian period and much work of earlier periods. It has set before itself an idea of absolute simplicity and sin­ cerity—an ideal which implies an individual, unstereotyped diction; and an individual, unstereotyped rhythm. Thus inspired it becomes intensive rather than diffuse. It looks out more eagerly than in; it becomes objective.

Although Imagism as a movement was short-lived, its "rules" became the foundation for twentieth century American poetry and the approaches through which its emphases were translated into poetry were as various i 26

as the poets who wrote. The poetry of most of the modern poets, how­

ever, challenged the traditional concepts of conventional versification,

poetic diction and the seriousness of the subjects suitable for poetry.

It had become important for the poet to experiment freely with verse

forms as well as with clear, concrete diction, and to center on the object of the poem as the means through which an abstract idea (such as

imagination, love, frustration, etc.) could best be presented.

Elizabeth Bishop's poetry clearly developed from this new tradition

in American poetry: it is the poetry of carefully crafted descriptions of specific places, objects and people written in conversational,

informal speech. The presentation of the subjects of her poems is grounded firmly in their concreteness, their "reaIitywhich is accepted as factual. Her feelings toward the subjects are presented through her descriptions of those subjects, not by means of abstract or philosophical statements. Like many modern poets, she often chooses subjects that had been traditionally limited to prose (the urban settings of "Varick Street," "Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore,"

"Filling Station," for example, and the character sketches of poems like "Manuelzinho" and "House Guest") and she uses the diction and rhythm of contemporary speech—idiomatic, immediate and assertive—to describe these subjects. Within the modern poetic tradition is the continual emphasis on the "thingness" of the object and on the experience of the speaker with that object; in Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, as we have seen throughout this study, the emphasis of each poem is directly on its subject and how the speaker responds to it. 127

Although Bishop has acknowledged in interviews and an essay that, she was deeply impressed by the poetry of W. H. Auden, it was Wallace

Stevens whom she described as "the contemporary who most affected my writing."? Although certainly with different intentions and different results, Stevens joins Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams in sharing a primary concern for presenting in their poetry detailed ob­ servations about the reality around them—a concern which Elizabeth

Bishop surely shares with them. Nancy Lee Bryan traces the development of Bishop's poetry through her relationship to these three poets and their insistence on the commonplace objects and scenes as subject- 8 matter for their poetry. She states that as factual poets they "share the common dilemma of trying to create an artistic whole from material g whose essential nature is its miscellaneousness." For both Williams and Moore this dilemma is resolved in poetry of documentation and observation which often seems to record the facts of the world around them as lyrical statements of their personal ideas. With Stevens there is a shift in emphasis, for he asserts that the facts themselves are altered by the imagination: "things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar" ("The Man with the Blue Guitar"). For each of these poets, the facts of a tangible, observable reality serve as the bases of their poetry. And, although these facts are necessarily altered by the speaker's presentation of them, the emphasis remains on the object itself and the process of perceiving it.

3ishop, like Williams, Moore and Stevens, places the immediate emphasis of her poetry "not in ideas, but in things." Although both 128

Stevens and Bishop write poems in which the speaker uses the object or scene as the impetus for contemplation (Bishop's "At the Fishhouses,"

for example), the ideas expressed are dependent on the "things" of the poem (even as philosophical a poem as Stevens' "Final Soliloquy of the

Interior Paramour" depends on the description of the room for the

intensity of its ideas). It is Bishop's description of the elements of a tactile, visible world that has led many to suppose that the

landscape itself is all there is to the poetry. But everything depends not only on our perception of the th ings—the colors, shapes, and relationships of objects—but also in our understanding of how the speaker of the poems perceives those things. What has been so notice­ able in Bishop's poetry is that the speaker remains very reserved and reticent in her descriptions, so that the reader often feels that there is a private significance to the scene that is unavailable to him. Each image and detail in Bishop's poetry works in a highly controlled pat­ tern designed not only to depict the subject of the poem but also to create beyond that subject the feelings of the speaker to the descrip­ tion and of the reader to the speaker and her poem. Bishop's poetic voice, like that of Marianne Moore to whom she is. frequently compared, is one of observation and inspection. She sees each detail of her description and, through often startling metaphors, notes their rela­ tionships to each other and to herself. What Bishop admired most in

Moore's poetry is the same power and quality that is evident in her own work: the "gift of being able to give herself up entirely to the object under contemplation, to feel in all sincerity how it is to be it."* 129

She has clearly inherited from Moore, Williams and Stevens the poetic insistence on the observable object as well as an emphasis on objective language and the conscious control and precision of often surprising images and metaphors.

Each of these poets, of course, was not merely writing poems which presented objects. Stevens, although he struggled with "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself," could not reconcile the world of the imagination with the world of the object—"things as they are:"'

I cannot bring a world quite round, Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero’s head, large eye And bearded bronze, but not a man.

Although I patch him as I can And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say that it is the serenade Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

("The Man with the Blue Guitar")

Much of Stevens' later poetry is directly concerned with this dilemma of poetry of things versus poetry of ideas, and his emphasis shifts to an almost philosophical one as he contemplates the importance or necessity of the objects. For Williams, also, the poem becomes the means by which the object and the idea are united through the presenta­ tion of seeing that object. Unlike Williams, Moore does not have much to say about the object but, instead, continually leads the reader back to the object itself. Although she "insists on having ideas about the . I 30

things, . . . her meditations are tied to and defined by the thing, not 12 released by it."

In her poetry, Bishop has developed the emphasis of observation

in a way that is not apparent in the three earlier poets. Because of

her careful use of poetic voice, the poems become not so much explana­

tions of perceiving objects as dramatic examples of the process of

perceiving. Like Moore, Bishop’s contempIations are limited by her

experience with the object, but in her role of "impersonal but highly

perceptive observer," Bishop is able to involve the reader more closely

in her poems than Moore can because there is a more clearly defined

sense of the speaker’s tone of voice and attitude toward the subject

in Bishop's poetry.

While Bishop is obviously a master of precise descriptions of the

object, the major concern in her poetry is with the speaker and her

relationship to that object. The speaker's tone of detachment, wry

amusement and speculation is characteristic of modern poetry as a

whole, and Bishop’s use of this tone is, as has been shown throughout the study of the poems, excellent. Even in her love poems hers is the modern voice that is not entirely sure that feelings can be trusted because the perception of feelings as well as of things is personal and arbitrary. Although the speaker describes her scenes with amusement, she is detached and matter-of-fact, rarely allowing emotional outbursts to force their way into the description. "Heavens,

I recognize the place, I know it!" ("Poem") is about as emotional as 131 she gets. In Bishop’s poetry there is always the reliance on the

ironic view, more specifically on the understatement that the speaker feels as she describes the scene. (In her interview with Ashley

Brown, 3ishop mentioned the use of understatement as one of the dis­ tinguishing characteristics of modern American poetry.'^ It is, with the speculative "one and the ironic stance of the speaker, present in I most of Bishop’s poetry.)

In many of the poems the speaker's presence is apparent most clearly through the selection of these images and the sensual language of the description, while in others there is a deliberate use of the dramatic tension between the fictional speaker and the reader that

Robert Frost described as the essence of good poetry. Like Frost,

Bishop often relies on a shifting tone of voice to reveal the speaker's ambiguous responses to the places and people she is describing. Using the diction of urban life, her language is that of conversation, and there is little of the "preciousness" that was characteristic of the

American poetry of the 1890's and early twentieth century.

Robert Mazzocco describes Bishop's poetry as "a matter of reticence, more than of evasion. And a matter of style. The style is extremely pure, at times persistently so, creating a chill in the landscape. It is a style in which everything is marvelously apparent, yet with a 14 kind of askance look, detached and a little amused." This detach­ ment has led many of her critics to classify her as an "academic" or

"Establishment" poet, a poet who has chosen to remain outside the major (and, by implication, the most important) interests and movements 132

in modern poetry.

Kenneth Rexroth defines this group of poets as those characterized

by "their narrowness, their lack of broad contact, or even interests,

in anything but a narrow range of contemporary English and American

poetry, Baroque English poetry, and their complication without com- I 5 plexity." Their distinguishing characteristics, he feels, is their

deliberate avoidance of responsibility in their poetry, a responsibility

which he equates with political awareness. Many critics who accede

that Bishop's poetry is "narrow" or "limited" seem to base this judgment on the consistency, and even predictability, of the speaker's tone of

voice or on Bishop's reliance on description. However, the range of

Bishop's poetic vision, as Jerome Mazzaro has noted, relates her to a

variety of both modern and contemporary concerns in poetry, such as the

"consistent pessimism about ultimate purpose," the existential percep- I 6 tion of objects as the only durability in life. She is not a poet of shallow surfaces, as poets like Elinor WyIie or Edith SitwelI were,

but has a depth and complexity in her poetry which Rexroth may not have recognized in the deceptively simple language and clear verbal pictures. While she does not share the belief of many of her contem­ poraries that poetry is a useful tool for political activism,she admits that "A Miracle for Breakfast" was written as a depression I 8 poem, that "Roosters" is a poem about war, and "The Burglar of

Babylon" seems to be a statement about the debilitating effects of

■poverty on the people who are forced to live in the slums;'

But Bishop distrusts history and politics and, when asked about 133

poets' Marxist involvements in the 1930's, said: "I was always opposed

to political thinking as such for writers. What good writing came out of that period, really? Perhaps a few good poems; Kenneth Fearing 19 wrote some. A great deal of it seemed to me very false." In "The

Map" she states that the function of poetry is to create a finer, more

delicate reality, one based on universal truth, than the facts of history permit. The majority of her poems are not concerned with political injustices but with the individual's perception of those objects and people of his world and of his relationship to them. Hers

is not a political world but a personal one in which the individual must recognize that his choices and decisions are "never wide and never free," and, like Crusoe, there is never the certainty that he has con­ sciously chosen at all. In Bishop's poetry there is a sense of

inevitability and disappointment, a knowledge that we have somehow

lost much that we prized. She has chosen to speak of these concerns in a poetry that describes the specifics of common scenes and people, but rather than making her a limited and, as Rexroth implies, old fashioned poet, her decision asserts that she is working from within a tradition that is remarkably American and remarkably contemporary.

She is a part of the poetic tradition which believes that it is through dealing with what can be observed and experienced that these broader and more universal issues can be most clearly understood. Stepanchev describes the modern poet as one who in reacting to what is clearly a hostile world, "places himself with such particularity that he avoids 20 ~ all obvious universality." For Elizabeth Bishop, as for many contem­ 134

porary poets, these particulars reveal a private geography from which

the reader can better understand the relationship between the speaker

and her surroundings.

Many of her readers have seen Bishop as a sort of final, and

refined, example of early twentieth-century poets. As M. L. Rosenthal

describes it: "After the stormy inventors of new rhythmic idioms and

new imaginative horizons had done their work, the gifted exquisites

would take over—remolding, improving, getting the nuances not of a 21 new artistic problem but of an established tradition." But Bishop

is more than just a "gifted exquisite" who perfected an earlier tradi­

tion of modern poetry. When Rosenthal states that she has "touched 22 the imagination of Cher] generation very little," he is not giving

an accurate description of Bishop's work or of her influence on the

post-modern generation of American poets.

Critics have tended to accept Rosenthal's judgment of Bishop's

importance and in many of the surveys of modern movements in American

poetry, she is either neglected completely or is relegated to a para­

graph or chapter on the "others" who are somehow uninvolved with the

major developments in contemporary poetry. So one of the most sur­

prising things about Bishop's poetry is the variety of contemporary

poets who not only admire her work but also have acknowledged their

indebtedness to her. In interviews and essays poets as diverse as

Frank O'Hara, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, John Ashbery, Howard

• Moss, Octavio Paz, Jerome Mazzaro and John Berryman have s-poken of the

importance of Bishop's work on their own poetry. Mazzaro states that 135

"More can be learned about how to write poetry from Elizabeth Bishop 23 than from reading the writings of most other poets." He explains

the reason for her influence power by stating:

In occasionally moving away from traditional structures Bishop is doing something similar to what critics of Pound say he did by moving away from iambic pentameter. Much as he opened the ear to new rhythms and new kinds of matter, she, in these non forma I, relational poems, opens the formal ele­ ments of poetry to new possibilities for seeing and tracking Ii fe.24

She does not feel that she has ever been a part of any particular

school of contemporary poetry, but she has clearly influenced the

direction of many of the poets in these groups. One of the most

notable examples can be seen in her influence on Robert Lowell, whose

Life Studies (1959) has often been used to mark the beginning of the

"confessional school" in contemporary poetry.

Robert Lowell, who has often described his debt to Elizabeth

Bishop, claims that the development of the new, more personal style of 25 his poetry in Li fe Studies owed much to Bishop. Terry Miller has

written an interesting study in which he traces Bishop’s influence

on Lowell by studying "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" (from Lord

Weary's Cast Ie, 1946) and "Skunk Hour" (Life Studies, 1959) in rela­ tion to Bishop's "The Armadillo" (1957).26 Miller asserts that Bishop's

style, as exemplified in this poem which was dedicated to Lowell, served

as a catalyst in his poetic transformation from a complex, highly struc­

tured style in which the form and language were applied from outside

.the poem to a somehow looser and freer style, one in which, the rhymes

and images serve the sense of the poem and not an idea of poetry. 136

Lowell states that In March, 1957, he became aware of how the structure

and language of his poetry was unable to express the emotions and

meanings he sought to share:

I felt my old poems hid what they were really about, and many times offered a stiff, humorless, and even impenetrable surface.. ... ÉMlly own poems seemed like prehistoric mon­ sters dragged down into the bog and death by their ponderous armor. I was reciting what I no longer felt.27

This disenchantment led Lowell to develop his poetry as direct explorations of the relationships he presented within the poems. The new direction negated his notion of poetry as formal statements— often supported by heavy-handed allusions to information outside the realm of the poem itself. He began to emphasize that the poem must be a vehicle through which the poet expresses his immediate responses to its subject.

The importance of Life Studies was that it introduced into modern poetry an insistence that the poem become a means for the poet to explore himself. The confessional poem was a personal, often auto­ biographical statement of how the speaker (who becomes synonymous with the poet) was surviving the feelings of alienation and victimization created by the hostile world in which he lived. The speaker explores an inner geography of his soul that is reflected by the places and objects in his environment (Lowell's "Skunk Hour," dedicated to

Bishop, is a useful example). Lowell's use of landscape was to dis­ cover or locate the self that inhabited its geography by describing the elements of that landscape. (Roethke's poetry also concentrates on this use of geography as a personal, autobiographical guide to the I 37

self.) Interestingly enough, in Lowell's early confessional poetry

there is an almost indirect expression of the emotions, a detachment

of the speaker from the feelings that he is describing through the

accumulation of the objects that inhabit the poem ("For the Union

Dead," for example). What Lowell felt to be of primary importance

was that the confessional poem creates a texture of reality so that

the fictionalized world of the poem seemed to be truth. He said

that the autobiographical elements must be such that the reader will 28 say, "this is truth." It is the appearance of truth that must be

realized; the poem itself did not necessarily have to be factually

accurate. To establish this sense of truth, the poet relied not

only on the description of details and elements in the geography of

the poem but also on a poetic voice that spoke intimately to the

reader, suggesting a bond by which the speaker and the reader shared

in the experiences, feelings and attitudes expressed in the poem.

Elizabeth Bishop has never been classified as an example of the

confessional or autobiographical school of poetry, yet there are many

ways in which the elements of her poetry can be found in the type of

poetry that Lowell began writing in 1959 and taught to students,

including Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Lowell's Li fe Studies is written in an almost prosaic style, informal and matter-of-fact, very

like the casual, conversational voice in Bishop's own poetry. There

is also a new tone of irony and understatement that reflects the pre­ dominate tone in much of Bishop's work. While it is obviously possible to show that many modern poets share these characteristics with Bishop, I 38

Lowe! 1 has made it clear that it was from her that he developed this

style: "... re-reading her suggested a way of breaking through the 29 shell of my old manner." Her influence may also be apparent in his

adherence to the accumulation of specific, commonplace things which

make the symbols of the poems personal and contained within the poem

itself rather than allusions to elements outside of the experience of

the poem.

Perhaps the most important element of the new style of poetry is

its insistence that the speaker create the illusion that what is

described is reality. Earl ier in this study it was noted that many

of Bishop's readers were so convinced of the literal truth of the

experiences in her poems that they concentrated on that element,

excluding the possibility that the poem is a fictionalized construct and that the speaker is using the description to explore her relation­

ship to the subject of the poem rather than merely providing an accu­

rate picture of the subject. Much of confessional poetry has suffered

from this same critical attitude as readers insist that the poet is

describing factual personal experiences and fail to understand the use of "autobiographical" as a means to universalize feelings through presenting what seems to be a specific and personal account.

There are specific elements of confessionaIism that also find a place in Bishop's poetry. The importance of discovering the past through describing childhood experience is evident in "Manners,"

"Sestina," "First Death in Nova Scotia," and, most notably, "In the

Waiting Room." The fear of madness appears in "Faustina, or Rock 139

Roses" and "Visits to St. Elizabeth's." The individual as alienated,

an exile from the world of other people, is a continual theme in her

poetry and is stated most forcefully in "Crusoe in England." And

central to all of Bishop’s poetry is the emphasis on travel, the

journey that is both physical and mental and usually raises more ques­

tions than it can provide answers for. The map for these journeys is

subjective, beautiful and precise, but not real. The individual

attempts to locate herself in the geography of the place around her,

but there is little optimism that she will be able to find answers

to the questions that are, really, just rhetorical. In spite of

the appearance of confessionaIism, however, Bishop, in contrast to

others of that school, reveals little about her personal life: "Every­

thing that we know about her from her poetry comes through images that

transform her particular suffering or loneliness or longing into

archetypal states of being.

Although she has been an influence on the development and character

of confessional poetry, there are other groups in contemporary poetry

with whom Bishop also shares some common elements. Many of her dream

poems ("Sleeping Standing Up," "Some Dreams They Forgot," "The Weed,"

for example) and certainly "The Man-Moth" are examples of the

surrealism of poets like Robert Bly and Carolyn Stoloff. The juxta­

position of the familiar with images of an almost nightmarish quality

produces a subjective quality which is not present in most of Bishop's other work. The surreal poems attempt to present a world connected

by, to use Bly's phrase, "leaping" images. For example, in "A Miracle 140

for Breakfast," the bread crumbs thrown from the balcony to feed the

people below are transformed into a beautiful villa:

In front, a baroque white plaster balcony added by birds, who nest along the river, — I saw it with one eye close to the crumb—

and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb my mansion, made for me by a miracle, through ages, by insects, birds, and the river working the stone. (II. 28-34)

Ralph Mills described the distortions and terrifying iI fusions of these fantasies and nightmares as closely connected with the surreal worlds of prose writers such as Kafka and Borges.3*

Karl Malkoff has also noted an interesting comparison made between Bishop and Charles Olson, the projectivist poet. He states that both poets are primarily concerned with the poem as an act of perception, stating that for both "the human universe is dependent upon the act of perception for its existence, . . . the writing of a poem

is itself the creation of a world, a world that may bear important relation to what we generally name reality but one that has an integrity 32 of its own." Malkoff admits that beyond this shared assumption, however, there is little else that is similar between these two diverse poets. Olson's poetic dicta were that "form is never more than an extension of content," that composition must be "by field, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form," that the poem is a high- energy construct seeking, and that each perception lead immediately to a fuller perception.33 There is little in his ph i losophy that would attract Elizabeth Bishop or describe her poetry, and Malkoff's statement 141

is more interesting for what it says of Bishop's work than for the connection he finds between the poets. Each of Bishop's poems is an

individual presentation of what the speaker perceives. Throughout this study we have seen Bishop's use of narrator to create her own world: the child’s startling realization of her connectedness with all people and with world events in the poem "In the Waiting Room," for example; or Crusoe's perception of his island world as a place to be re-created through his attempts to introduce his civilization to it, only to discover when back in England that the isolation of that world was preferable to the stultification of civilized life. In "The Gentleman of Shalott" the speaker sees his world as mirrored existence, and the perception of the world in "Visits to St. Elizabeth's" is equally full of incomplete and disconnected images. The speaker’s perception of these people and places is the reality of them, however much it does not support a "real" world outside the poem. Bishop’s poetry, as clear and precise studies of landscapes, reveals the speaker through her intense relationship with it. The landscapes are often of despair, but more importantly they are of survival as each poem records a moment when the speaker has been able to create a new reaIity in the poem.

Whatever connections critics find between Bishop and other modern and contemporary poets or between Bishop and the various schools in American poetry, they will find little support from Bishop herself.

She has been notably reticent to state any of her ideas about poetry—either aesthetic or technical—and distrusts criticism that 142 she describes as "pretentious and deadly . . . making poetry monstrous 34 or boring or proceeding to talk the very life out of it." At a time when poets seem as eager to share their theories of poetry as they do to share their poetry, her reluctance to do so is both admirable and frustrating. In 1950 she writes in response to questions posed by John Ciardi on her "personal writing principles": "It all depends on the particular poem one happens to be trying to write, and the range of possibilities is, one trusts, infinite. After all, the poet's 35 concern is not consistency." This avoidance to discuss her aesthetic continues. In her interview with George Starbuck (1977), she says:

"It takes probably hundreds of things coming together at the right moment to make a poem and no one can ever really separate them out and say this did that, that did that."^

This reluctance to state her discoveries about the state of con­ temporary American poetry and her involvement within it is not as limiting as it might seem. By not making statements about her art, she forces the reader to study the poems themselves to discover her connections with other poets and her attitudes toward the art of writing poetry, Elizabeth Bishop has obviously been influenced by what is not the "traditional poetry" of early modern American poets and has served to influence the later developments in contemporary

American poetry. Her reputation, however, should not depend on where she fits into the scheme of modern poetry but on how effective and moving her poetry is for her readers. 143 Footnotes

*David W. McCullough, "Eye on Books," Book-of-the-Month Cl ub

News, (May 1977), p. 6, 2 Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton:

Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), describes these poets in this way:

Their poems are, in the bad sense, exercises in rhetoric, too-delicate evocations of the trivial or too-robust summonings-up of the "sublime." They feel like poets but do not write like them—now over-excited, now playing it too safe, .utterly at a loss to deal with live situations, in live lan­ guage; for all their sense of dedication, more interested in being creative than in creating (p. 256). 3F.S. Flint, "Imagisme," Poetry, 1 (1913), 198-200.

^Ezra Pound, "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste," Poetry, 1 (1913),

200-06. 5 Harriet Monroe, "Introduction," in The New Poetry: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Verse in English, ed. Harriet Monroe and Alice

Corbin Henderson (New York: Macmillan, 1923), pp. xxxv-xxxvi.

®To Ashley Brown ("An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop," Shenandoah,

17, No. 2 [1966], 9), Bishop said: "I started reading [Auden] in college.

I bought all his books as they came out and read him a great deal. But he didn't affect my poetic practice." And in her article, "A Brief

Reminiscence and A Brief Tribute," The Harvard Advocate, 108, Nos. 2-3

[1976], 47, she stated: "We hurried to see his latest poem or book, and either wrote as much like him as possible, or tried hard not to." ^Brown, p. 9. 144

8 Nancy Lee Bryan, "A Place for the Genuine: Elizabeth Bishop and the Factual Tradition in Modern American Poetry," Diss. Claremont 1973.

^Bryan, p. 24.

^Elizabeth Bishop, "As We Like It," Quarterly Review of Literature,

4, No. 2 (1968), 179. 11 Roy Harvey Pearce, Hi stori ci sm Once More: Prob Iems and Occasions for the American Scholar (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), p.

276.

^Pearce, Conti nuity of Amer i can Poetry, p. 370.

'^ESrown, p. 5. When describing the differences between American poetry and Brazilian poetry, Bishop said: "It's an interesting fact that there is not word in Portuguese for 'Understatement.' Marianne

Moore's poetry is nearly all understatement. How can they understand us? So much of the Eng I ish-American tradition consists of this. They have irony, but not understatement."

'"^Robert Mazzocco, "A Poet of Landscape," rev. of Question of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop, New York Review of Books, 55 (October 5, 1967), 4. 15 Kenneth Rexroth, American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (New

York: Seabury Press, 1971), p. 4.

'^Jerome Mazzaro, "Elizabeth Bishop and the Poetics of Impediment,"

SaImagund i, 27 (1974), 143.

^Most recently Bishop has displeased feminists by refusing to allow her poetry to be anthologized in all-women collections of verse.

She discussed this with me in a conversation on April 6, 1977, which 145

restated what she told George Starbuck ('"The Work!' A Conversation

with Elizabeth Bishop," PIoughshares, 3, Nos. 3-4 [1977], 21):

When I was in college and started publishing, even then, and in the following few years, there were women's anthologies and all-women issues of magazines, but I always refused to. be in them. I didn't think about it very seriously, but I felt it was a lot of non­ sense, separating the sexes. I suppose this feeling came from feminist principles, per­ haps stronger than I was aware of.

^Brown, p. 13.

Brown, p. 8. 20 Stephen Stepanchev, Ameri can Poetry Si nee 1945: A_Critical

Survey (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 5. 21 M.L. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets: A Critical Interpretation

(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), p. 254.

22Rosenthal, p. 253.

23jerome Mazzaro, "Elizabeth Bishop's Particulars," World Literature

Today, 50, No. 1 (1977), 46.

24Mazzaro, "Elizabeth Bishop’s Particulars," p. 49.

25 Robert Lowell, interview in The Contemporary Poet as Artist and

Critic, ed. Anthony Ostroff (Boston, 1964), p. 108, cited in Terry

Miller, "The Prosodies of Robert Lowell," Speech Monographs, 35 (1968) p. 425. ^Miller, pp. 425-34.

27Mi Iler, p. 425.

2®MiIler, p. 425.

2^See the footnote to Robert Lowell. "The Skunk Hour," in The Norton 146

AnthoIoqy of Modern Poetry, ed. Richard El I man and Robert O'Clair

(New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), p. 938. ■^Marie-Claire Blais, "Presentation of Elizabeth Bishop' to the

Jury," World Literature Today, 50, No. 1 (1977), 7. 3'Ralph J. Mills, Jr., Contemporary American Poetry (New York:

Random House, 1965), pp. 77-78.

32«arl Malkoff, "Elizabeth Bishop," in Crowell's Handbook to

Contemporary Poetry (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973), p. 68.

^Charles Olson, "Projective Verse," in Selected Writings (New

York: New Directions, 1951), p. 16.

^Elizabeth Bishop, "It All Depends," in Mid-Century American

Poets, ed. John Ciardi (New York: Twayne, 1950), p. 267.

"^Bishop, "It All Depends," p. 267.

^Starbuck, p. 18. 14 7 Bi bIiography

Works by Elizabeth Bishop

Collections of Poetry

North & South. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946.

Poems. London: Chatto & Windus, 1955.

Poems: North South - A Co Id Spri ng. Boston: Houghton Mi ffI in,

Questions of Travel. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965.

Selected Poems. London: Chatto & Windus, 1966.

The Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon. New York: Farrar, Straus

& Gi roux, 1968.

The Complete Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.

Geography III. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976.

Prose Works and Translations

"Then Came the Poor." The Magazine, 1, No. 4 (1934), 105-10.

"The Baptism." Life and Letters Today, 16 (1937), 71—78.

"The Hanging of the Mouse." Life and Letters Today, 17 (1937), 111-12.

"fheSea and Its Shore." Life and Letters Today, 17 (1937), 103-08.

"In Prison." Partisan Review, 4, No. 4 (1938), 3-10.

"Gregorio Valdes, 1879-1939." Partisan Review, 6, No. 4 (1939), 91-

96.

"As We. Like It." Quarterly Review of Literature, 4, No. 2 (1948),

129-35. [Study of Marianne Moore's poetry.]

"It All Depends." In Mid-Century American Poets. Ed. John Ciardi. 143

New York, 1950.

"What the Young Man Said to the Psalmist." Poetry, 79 (1952), 212-14.

[Discussion of Wallace FowIie's Pantomime, JournaI of RehearsaIs.]

"Gwendolyn." New Yorker, 29 (June 27, 1953), 26-31.

"In the Village." New Yorker, 29 (Dec. 19, 1953), 26-34.

The Diary of Helena Morley. Trans. Elizabeth Bishop. New York: Farrar,

Straus & Giroux, 1957.

------, and the Editors of Life. BraziI. New York: Time-Life

Books, 1962.

"Flannery O'Connor, 1925-1964." The New York Review of Books, 3, No. 4

(Oct. 8, 1964), 21.

"On the Railroad Named Delight." The New York Times Magazine, 7 March

1965, pp. 30-31.

------, and Emanuel Brasil, eds. An Anthology of Twentieth-

Century Brazilian Poetry. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ.

Press, 1972.

"A Brief Reminiscence and A Brief Tribute." The Harvard Advocate,

108, Nos. 2-3 [1976], 47-48. [Tribute to W.H. Auden.]

"Laureate's Words of Accepatance." World Literature Today, 50, No. 1

(1977), 12.

Selected Bibliography

Adams, Phoebe. "Short Reviews: Books." Rev. of The Complete Poems,

by Elizabeth Bishop. At I antic, 223 (1969), 112.

Alvarez, A. "I mag ism and Poetesses." Rev. of Poems: North & South - 149

A Cold Spring, by Elizabeth Bishop. Kenyon Review, 19 (1957),

321.-22, 324-29.

Anon. Rev. of An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry,

eds. Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil. Choice, 9 (1972), 1136.

------. Rev. of The Complete Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Book Ii st,

66 (Sept. 1, 1969), 24.

Rev. of The Comp Iete Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Books

& Bookmen, 16 (1971), 36.

------. Rev. of The Comp Iete Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Choice,

6 (1969), 812.

Rev. of The Complete Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Guardian

Weekly, 130 (Dec. 19, 1970), 20.

------. Rev. of The Comp Iete Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. The New

York Times Book Review, June 8, 1969, p. 59.

------. Rev. of The Complete Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Observer,

Jan. 3, 1971, p. 30.

Rev. of The Complete Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Publisher's

Week Iy, 195 (March 10, 1969), 68.

Rev. of Geography III, by Elizabeth Bishop. Book Week,

May 6, 1977, p. F7.

Rev. of Geography III, by Elizabeth Bishop. Booklist, 73

(May 15, 1977), 1396.

Rev. of North & South, by Elizabeth Bishop. Ki rkus, 14

(1946), 380.

------. Rev. of Poems: North South - A Cold Spring, by EIizabeth

Bishop. Book list, 52 (Sept. 1, 1955), 9. I 50

Rev. of Poerns: North &_ South - A Co I d Spring, by E I i zabeth

Bishop. L i brary JournaI, 80 (Oct. 15, 1955), 2242.

Rev. of Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop. Book-

1 ist, 62 (ApriI 1, 1966), 746.

Rev. of Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop. Choice,

2 (1966), 858.

-■------. Rev, of Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop. Pub-

Ii sher's Weekly, 191 (June 20, 1967), 69.

Rev. of Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop. Pub-

Ii sher's Weekly, 192 (Oct. 16, 1967), 59-60.

Rev. of Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop. Ki rkus,

33 (1965), 951.

Ashbery, John. "Second Presentation of Elizabeth Bishop." World Litera­

ture Today, 51, No. 1 (1977), 8-11.

Rev. of The Complete Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. The New

Times Book Review, 1 June 1969, pp. 8, 25.

Arnold, Walter E. "Critics' Choice for Christmas." Rev. of The Complete

Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. CommonweaI, 91 (Dec. 5, 1969), 311.

Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Ed. J.O. Urmin. New York:

Oxford Univ. Press, 1962.

Bacon, Martha. "The Children's Trip to the Gallows." Rev. of The

Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon, by Elizabeth Bishop. At I ant i c,

222 (1968), 148, 151-53.

Baro, Gene. "Clear Vision." Rev. of Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth

Bishop. The New York Times Book Review, 26 March 1967, p. 5. I 51

Beardsley, Monroe C. The Possibility of Criticism. Detroit: Wayne

State Univ. Press, 1970.

Bernlef, J. "Judith Herzberg en Elisabeth Bishop." De Gids, 131

(1968), 325-37.

Bertin, Celia. "A Novelist's Poet." VtorId Literature Today, 51, No. 1

(1977), 16-17.

Bi dart, Frank. "On Elizabeth Bishop." World Literature Today, 51,

No. 1 (1977), 19.

Blais, Marie-Claire. "Presentation of Elizabeth Bishop to the Jury."

World Literature Today, 51, No. 1 (1977), 7.

Bloom, Harold. "Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop." New Repub lie,

176 (1977), 29-30.

Bogan, Louise. A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and

Vocation. Eds. Robert Phelps and Ruth Limmer, New York: McGraw-Hill,

1970.

"Verse." Rev. of North & South, by Elizabeth Bishop.

New Yorker, 22 (Oct. 5, 1946), 113-15.

Booth, Philip. "The Poet as Voyager." Rev. of Questions of Travel,

by Elizabeth Bishop. Christian Science Monitor, 58 (Jan. 6, 1966),

10.

Brower, Reuben. The Fields of Light. New York: Oxford Univ. Press,

1951.

------, and Richard Poirier, eds. In Defense of Reading. New York:

E.P. Dutton, 1962.

Brown, Ashley, "Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil." The Southern Review, 13 152

No. 4 (1977), 688-704.

"An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop." Shenandoah, 17,

No. 2 (1966), 3-19.

Brownjohn, Alan. "Absorbing Chaos." Rev. of The Complete Poems, by

Elizabeth Bishop. New Statesman, 80 (1970), 772-73.

Bruns, Gerald L. Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language: A CriticaI

and Historical Study. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974.

Bryan, Nancy Lee. "A Place for the Genuine: Elizabeth Bishop and the

Factual Tradition in Modern American Poetry." Diss. Claremont 1973.

Chatman, Seymour. An Introduction to the Language of Poetry. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1968.

Chittick, V.L.O. "Nomination for a Laureateship." Dalhousie Review,

35 (1955), 145-57.

Cohen, J.M. Poetry of this Age: 1908-1958. London: Hutchinson, 1960.

Constable, John. "John Constable on the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop."

Rev. of The Complete Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Spectator, 227

(Sept. 18, 1971), 416-17.

Cotter, James F. "Does Poetry Have an Audience?" Rev. of The Comp Iete

Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. America, 122 (Feb. 21, 1970), 187-88.

Cluysenaar, .Anne. "New and Translated Poetry." Rev. of The Complete

Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Stand, 12, No. 3 (1972), 72-79.

Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: StructuraIi sm, Li ngu i sties,

and the Study of Literature. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornel I Univ. Press,

1975.

Davie, Donald. "Sincerity and Poetry." Michigan Quarterly Review, 5 153

(1966), 3-8.

"What is Modern Poetry?" In Approaches to the Poem.

Ed. John Oliver Perry. San Francisco: Chandler, 1965, pp. 313-25.

Davis, D.M. Rev. of Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop.

National Observer, 4 (Dec, 27, 1965), 17.

Davison, Peter. "The Gilt Edge of Reputation: Twelve Months of New

- Poetry." Rev. of Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop.

Atlantic, 220 (1966), 82-85.

Davy, Charles. Words in the Mind: Exploring Some Effects of Poetry,

Eng Iish and French. London: Chatto & Windus, 1965.

Dickey, William. "The Thing Itself." Rev, of Questions of Travel,

by Elizabeth Bishop. Hudson Review, 19 (1966), 147.

Dodsworth, Martin. "The Human Note." Rev. of Selected Poems, by

Elizabeth Bishop. The Listener, 78 (Nov. 30, 1967), 720-22.

Dorsey, M.A. Rev. of The Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon, by Elizabeth

Bishop. Li brary JournaI, 93 (1968), 2118.

Eberhart, Richard. "With Images of Actuality." Rev. of Poems: North

&_ South - A, Cold Spri ng, by EI i zabeth Bishop. The New York Times

Book Review, 17 July 1955, p. 4.

Ehrenpreis, Irvin. "Solitude and' Isolation." Rev. of Questions of

Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop. Virginia Quarterly Review, 42 (1966),

332-36,

Elliott, C. "Minor Poet with a Major Fund of Love." Rev. of The Complete

Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Life, 67 (July 4, 1969), 13. 154

E'mig, Janet. "The Poem as Puzzle." Eng I i sh Journa I , 52 (1963), 222-

24.

Estess, Sybil. "Elizabeth Bishop: The Delicate Art of Map-Making."

The Southern Review, 13, No. 4 (1977), 705-27.

"Toward the Interior: Epiphany in 'Cape Breton' As

Representative Poem." World Literature Today, 51, No. 1 (1977),

49-52.

Fowlie, Wallace. "Poetry of Silence." CommonweaI, 65 (Feb- 15, 1957),

514-16.

Frankenberg, Lloyd. "A Meritorious Prize Winner." Rev. of North &

South, by Elizabeth Bishop. Saturday Review, 29 (Oct. 12, 1946),

46.

"Elizabeth Bishop." In Pleasure Dome: On Reading Modern

Poetry. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949, pp. 331-38.

Fraser, G.S "Some Younger American Poets." Commentary, 23 (1957),

454-62.

Fukuda, Rikutaro. "Elizabeth Bishop to Brazil." Eigo Seinen, 119

(1974), 674-75.

Fuller, John. "The Iceberg and the Ship." Rev. of The Complete Poems,

by Elizabeth Bishop. The Listener, 85 (April 8, 1971), 456-57.

Gant, Liz. Rev. of An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry,

eds. Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil. Black World, 22 (1973),

92-93.

Gass, William H. "The Concept of Character in Fiction;" New American

Review 7. New York: New American Library, 1969, pp. 128-44. 155

Gibbs, Barbara. "A Just Vision." Rev. of North & South, by Elizabeth

Bishop. Poetry, 69 (1947), 228-31.

Gordon, Jan B. "Days and Distances: The Cartographic Imagination of

Elizabeth Bishop." SaImaqund i, 22-23 (1973), 294-305.

Grant, D. Rev. of Selected Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Tablet,

3 Feb. 1968, p. 108.

Gray, Paul. "A Quartet of Poets Singing Solo." Rev. of Geography III,

by Elizabeth Bishop. Time, 21 March 1977, pp. 90-93.

Hamilton, I. Rev. of Selected Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Observer,

31 Dec. 1967, p. 20.

Hanks, Patricia Doran. "Elizabeth Bishop: An Evaluation." BA Honors

Thesis, Tulane University 1971.

Harrison, Tony. "Wonderland." Rev. of Questions of Travel, by Eliza­

beth Bishop. London Magazine, April/May 1971, pp. 163-68.

Hartman, Geoffrey. "Literary Criticism and Its Discontents." Critical

Inquiry, 3, No. 2 (1976), 203-20.

"The Use and Abuse of Structural Analysis: Riffaterre's

I nterpretat ion of Wordsv/orth's 'Yew Trees'." New Literary History,

7, No. 1 (1975), 165-89.

Hassan, Ihab. Contemporary American Literature: 1945-1972: An Intro-

duction. New York: Frederick Unger, 1973.

Hayman, Ronald. "Vozhesensky, Elizabeth Bishop, Thom Gunn." Rev. of

Selected Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Encounter, 31 (1968), 69-72.

Hochman, Sandra., "Some of America's Most Natural Resources." Rev. of

Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop. Book Week, 20 Feb. 1966, ! 56

p. 4.

Hopkins, Crale D. "inspiration as Theme: Art and Nature in the Poetry

of Elizabeth Bishop." Arizona Quarterly, 32 (1976), 197-212.

"Houghton Mifflin Awards Poetry Prize Fellowship." Publi sher's Weekly,

148 (July 7, 1945), 35. [To Bishop for North & South manuscript.]

Howes, Victor. "'Geography 111' Focuses on Places." Christian Science

Monitor, 69 (Feb. 9, 1977), p. 23.

Ivask, Ivor. "Elizabeth Bishop: 1976 Laureate of the Books Abroad/

Neustadt International Prize for Literature." Books Abroad: An

International Literary Quarterly, 50, No. 2 (1976), 263-65.

"Homage to Elizabeth Bishop, Our 1976 Laureate: World

Literature Today, or Books Abroad II and Geography III." WorId

Literature Today, 51, No. 1 (1977), 5-6.

Jaffee, Dan. "Voice of the Poet: Oracular, Eerie, Daring." Rev. of

The Complete Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Saturday Review of Litera­

ture, 52 (Sept. 6, 1969), 28-29, 62.

James, Clive. "Everything's Rainbow." Rev., of The Comp I ete Poems, by

Elizabeth Bishop. The Review, 25 (1971), 51-57.

Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age. New York: Knopf, 1953.

------. The Third Book of Criticism. New York: Farrar, Straus &

Giroux, 1969.

Jefferson, Margo. "The Map Maker." Rev. of Geography III, by Elizabeth

Bishop. Newsweek, 31 Jan. 1977, pp. 73-74.

Jones, Brian. "Singing Out." Rev. of Selected Poems, by Elizabeth

Bishop. London Magazine, March 1968, pp. 84-87. 157

Juhasz, Suzanne. Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by

'Women: A New Tradition. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

"Jurors and Candidates." Books Abroad: An International Literary

Quarterly, 50, No. 1 (1976), 92-93. [Nomination of Elizabeth

Bishop for the Books Abroad/Neustadt International Award for

Literature.]

Kalstone, David. "All Eye." Rev. of The Complete Poems, by Elizabeth

Bishop. Partisan Review, 37 (1970), 310-15.

"Conjuring with Nature: Some Twentieth Century Readings

of Pastoral," Harvard English Studies 2. Ed. Reuben Brower.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971, pp. 246-68.

------. Five Temperaments: EIi zabeth Bishop, Robert Lowe I I , James

Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery. New York: Oxford Univ. Press

1977.

"Questions of Memory—New Poems by Elizabeth Bishop."

Ploughshares, 2, No. 4 (1975), 173-81.

Kavanagh, P.J. "Poetry and Manners." Rev. of Selected Poems, by

Elizabeth Bishop. Manchester Guardian, 97 (Nov. 2, 1967), 11.

Kirby-Smith, H.T., Jr. "Miss Bishop and Others." Rev. of The Complete

Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Sewanee Review, 80 (1972), 483-93.

Kunitz, Stanley. A Kind of Order, A Ki nd of Folly: Essays and Conversa

tions. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975.

Lask, Thomas. "Serene and Star-Crazed." Rev. of Geography I I I,■by

Elizabeth Bishop. The New York Times, 22 Jan. 1977, p. 19. 158

"The Window.and The Mirror." Rev. of The Comp Iete Poems,

by Elizabeth Bishop. The New York Times, 1 June 1969, p. 33.

Leh, W. "The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop." Diss. London 1976.

Leibowitz, Herbert. "The Elegant Maps of Elizabeth Bishop." Rev. of

Geography III, by Elizabeth Bishop. The New York Times Book Review,

82 (Feb. 8, 1977), 7, 20-21?

Lewis, R.W.B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in

the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955.

"Loitering Between Dream and Experience." Rev. of The Complete Poems,

by Elizabeth Bishop. Times Literary Supplement, 70 (Jan. 22, 1971),

92.

Lowell, Robert. "Thomas, Bishop, and Williams." Rev. of The Complete

Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Sewanee Review, 55, No. 3 (1947), 493-

503.

McCullough, David W. "Eye on Books." Book-of-the-Month Club News, May,

1977, pp. 6, 20, 22. [Discussion of Bishop and Geography III.]

McDonaId, G.D. Rev. of Poems: North South - A_ Cold Spri ng, by Eli za-

Bishop. Kirkus, 23 (1955), 320.

McNally, Nancy L. "Checklist of Elizabeth Bishop's Published Writings."

Twentieth-Century Literature, 11 (1966), 201.

"Elizabeth Bishop: The Discipline of Description." Twen­

tieth-Century Literature, 11 (1966), 189-201.

Maddocks, Melvin. "For Poets of All Ages.: Rev. of The Ballad of the

Burglar of Babylon, by Elizabeth Bishop. Christian Science Monitor,

2 May 1968, p. B9. 159

Malkoff, Karl. "Elizabeth Bishop." In Crowell's Handbook to

Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Karl Malkoff. New York: Thomas Y.

Crowell, 1973, pp. 67-74.

Martin, Robert K. "Taking the World for What It Is." Rev. of

Geography III, by Elizabeth Bishop. Christopher Street, March

1977, pp. 51-54.

Martz, Louis L. "Recent Poetry: Looking for a Home.: Rev. of

Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop. Yale Review, 55 (1966),

458-69. ■

Mazzaro, Jerome. "Elizabeth Bishop and the Poetics of Impediment."

SaImagund i, 27 (1974), 118-44.

"Elizabeth Bishop’s Particulars." World Literature Today,

51, No. 1 (1977), 46-49.

Mazzocco, Robert. "A Poet of Landscape." Rev. of Questions of Travel,

by Elizabeth Bishop. New York Review of Books, 55 (Oct. 12, 1967),

4-6.

Michelson, Peter. "Sentiment and Artifice: Elizabeth Bishop and Isabella

Gardner." Rev. of Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop. Chicago

Review, 18, Nos. 3-4 (1966), 188-96.

Miller, Terry. "The Prosodies of Robert Lowell." Speech Monographs,

35 (1968), 425-34. [Includes discussion of Bishop's "The Armadillo."]

Mills, Ralph J., Jr. "Eli zabeth Bi shop." In Contemporary American

Poetry. New York: Random House, 1965, pp. 72-83.

Monroe, Harriet, and Alice Corbin Henderson. The New Poetry: An

AnthoIogy of Twentieth-Century Verse in Eng 1ish. New York: MacmiI Ian 160

1923.

"Looking Backward." Poetry, 33 (1928), 32-38..

Moore, Marianne. "Archaically New." In Trial Balances: An Anthology

of New Poetry. Ed. Ann Winslow. New York: Macmillan, 1935, pp.

82-83. [Comments on Bishop's poetry included in anthology.]

"A Modest Expert." Rev. of North & South, by Elizabeth

Bishop. Nation, 163 (1946), 354.

"Senhora Helena." In A Marianne Moore Reader. New York:

Viking Press, 1961, pp. 226-29. [On The Diary of 'Helena Morley'.]

Moore, Richard. "Elizabeth Bishop: ’The Fish'." Boston University

Studies i n Eng I ish, 2 (1956), 251-59.

Mortimer, Penelope. "Elizabeth Bishop's Prose." World Literature

Today, 51, No. 1 (1977), 17-18.

Moss, Howard. "All Praise." Rev. of Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth

Bishop. Kenyon Review, 28 (1966), 255-62.

------. "The Canada-Brazil Connection." World Literature Today,

51, No. 1 (1977), 29-33.

Mueller, Lisel. "The Sun the Other Way Around.” Rev. of Questions of

Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop. Poetry, 108 (1966), 335-37.

Mullen, Richard E. Rev. of Geography III, by Elizabeth Bishop. America,

136 (June 18, 1977), 552.

Neiswender, Rosemary. Rev. of An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian

Poetry, eds. Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil. Library JournaI,

97 (1972), 2404. 161

Nelson, E. Rev. of The Complete Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. Spirit

(1969), p. 37.

Nelson, Elizabeth R. Rev. of The Complete Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop.

L i brary Journa1, 94 (1969), 1883.

Rev. of Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop. Li brary

JournaI, 90 (1965), 4090.

Nemerov, Howard. "The Poems of ELizabeth Bishop." Rev. of Poems:

North & South - A Cold Spring, by Elizabeth Bishop. Poetry, 87

(1955), 179-82.

Newman, Anne R. "Elizabeth Bishop's 'Songs for a Colored Singer'."

World Literature Today, 51, No. 1 (1977), 37-40.

North, Charles. "Abstraction and Elizabeth Bishop." The Poetry Project

News Ietter, 48 (1977), 5-7.

Olson, Charles. "Projective Verse." In Selected Writings. New York: ,

New Directions, 1951, pp. 15-26.

Packard, William, ed. The Craft of Poetry: Interviews from The New York

Quarterly. New York: Doubleday, 1974.

"The Passing Strange." Rev. of Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop.

Time, 86 (Dec. 24, 1965), 64.

Paz, Octavio. "Elizabeth Bishop, or the Power of Reticence." World

Literature Today, 51, No. 1 (1977), 15-16.

Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton:

Princeton Univ, Press, 1961'.

------. Historicism Once More: Problems and Occasions for the

American Scholar. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969. 162

Phillips, Robert. The Confessional Poets. Carbondale, III.: Southern

Illinois Univ Press; London: Feffer & Simons, 1973.

"Poets Among Us." Rev. of North & South, by Elizabeth Bishop. Vogue,

121 (April 15, 1953), 91.

Porter, Andrew. "Musical Events: A Mirror on Which to Dwell. E. Carter's

Setting of Six Poems." New Yorker, 52 (March 8, 1976), 122, 125-26.

[Discussion of Elliott Carter's musical setting for six of Bishop's

poems.]

Pound, Ezra. "A Few Donits by an Imagiste." Poetry, 1 (1913), 200-06.

Pratt, William. The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature. New York:

E.P. Dutton, 1963.

Rexroth, Kenneth. American Poetry in the Twentieth Century. New York:

Seabury Press, 1971.

"Song of a Hunted Man." Rev. of The Ballad of the Burglar

of Babylon, by Elizabeth Bishop. New York Times Book Review, 5 May

1968, p. 2.

Riffaterre, Michael. "Interpretation and Descriptive Poetry: A Reading

of Wordsworth's 'Yew-Trees'." New Literary History, 4, No. 2 (1973),

229-56.

Rizza, Peggy. "Another. Side of Life: Women as Poets." In American Poetry

Since 1960 - Some Critical Perspectives. Ed. Robert B. Shaw. Chester

Springs, Penn.: Dufour Editions, 1974, pp. 167-79.

Rodman, Selden. "Carefully Revealed." Rev. of North & South, by

Elizabeth Bishop. New York Times Book Review, 27 Oct. 1946, p. 18.

Rosenberger, Coleman. "Bishop Poems, Old and New." Rev. of Poems : 163

North & South - A Cold Spri ng, by EIi zabeth Bi shop. New York

Herald Tribune, 32 (Sept. 4, 1955), 2.

Rosenthal, M.L. The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction. New York:

Oxford Univ. Press, 1960.

Sayers, Raymond. Rev. of An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian

Poetry, eds. Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil. Modern Language

Journal, 57 (1973), 232-33.

Scanlon, L.P. "Briefly Noted and Late Arrivals." Rev. of The Bal lad

of the Burglar of Babylon, by Elizabeth Bishop. Commonweal, 89

(Nov. 22, 1968), 294-95.

Schramm, Richard. "A Gathering of Poets." Rev. of An Anthology of

Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry, eds. Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel

Brasil. Western Humanities Review, 26 (1972), 389-99.

Schwartz, Lloyd. "The Mechanical Horse and the Indian Princess: Two

Poems from North & South." World Literature Today, 51, No. 1 (1977),

41-44.

Seager, Allan. The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke. New

York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.

Sensabaugh, L.F. Rev. of BraziI, eds. Elizabeth Bishop and the Editors

of Life. Hispanic American Historical Review, August 1963, p. 479.

Sheehan, Donald. "The Silver Sensibility: Five Recent Books of

American Poetry." Rev. of The Comp Iete Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop.

Contemporary Literature, 12 (1971), 98-121.

Slater, Constance. "Brazil in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop." WorId

Literature Today, 51, No. 1 (1977), 33-36. 164

Smith, William Jay. "Geographical Questions: The Recent Poetry of

Elizabeth Bishop." The Hollins Critic, 14, No. 1 (1977), 1-11.

"New Books of Poems." Rev. of Questions of Travel, by

Elizabeth Bishop. Harpers, 233 (Aug. 1966), 89-92.

Snell, George. Rev. of North & South, by EIizabeth. Bi shop. San

Franci sco ChronicIe, Jan. 12, 1947, p. 20.

Southworth, James G. "The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop." Col lege

English, 20 (1959), 213-17.

Spiegelman, Willard. "Landscape and Knowledge: The Poetry, of Elizabeth

Bishop." Modern Poetry Studies, 6 (1975), 203-24.

Stepanchev, Stephen. "Elizabeth Bishop." In American Poetry Since

1945: A Critical Survey. New York: Harper & Row, 1965, pp. 69-79.

Stevenson, Anne. EIi zabeth Bi shop. New York: Twayne, 1966.

"The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop: Precision and Resonance."

Shenandoah, 17, No. 2 (1966), 45-54.

Taylor, Eleanor Ross. "Driving to the Interior: A Note on Elizabeth

Bishop." World Literature Today, 51, No. 1 (1977), 44-46.

Taylor, Henry. "A Gathering of Poets." Rev. of The Complete Poems,

by Elizabeth Bishop. Western Humanities Review, 23 (1969), 363-68.

Thompson, Karl F. Explication of "The Colder the Air." The Exp Ii cator,

12 (1954), 33.

Tomlinson, C. Rev, of Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop.

Shenandoah, 17, No. 2 (1966), 88-91.

"Unamerican Editions." Rev. of Selected Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop.

Times Literary Supplement, 66 (Nov, 23, 1969), 1106. 165

Vendler, Helen. Rev. of An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian

. Poetry, eds. Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil. New York Times

Book Review, 7 Jan. 1973, p. 4.

"Domestication, Domesticity and the Otherworldly." Vtor I d

Literature Today, 51, No. 1 (1977), 23-28.

"New Books in Review: Recent Poetry; 8 Poets.” Rev. of

Geography III, by Elizabeth Bishop. Yale Review, 66 (1977), 407-24.

Wag ley, Charles. Amazon Town: A Study of Man in the Tropics. New York:

Knopf, 1964.

Walsh, Chad. Rev. of The Complete Poems, by Elizabeth Bishop. EBook

World, 3 (April 27, 1969), 8.

Warnke, Frank J. "The Voyages of Elizabeth Bishop." Rev. of Questions

of T rave I, by Elizabeth Bishop. New Repub lie, 154 (April 9, 1966),

19-21.

Weeks, Edward. "The Atlantic Bookshelf." Rev. of North & South, by

Elizabeth Bishop. At I ant i c, 178 (1946), 146.

Williams, Oscar. "North but South." Rev. of North & South, by Elizabeth

Bishop. New Repub lie, 115 (Oct. 21, 1946), 525.

Wood, Michael. "RSVP." Rev. of Geography III, by Elizabeth Bishop.

New York Review of Books, 24 (June 9, 1977), 29-30.

Yonge, Eva L. Rev. of BraziI, eds. Elizabeth Bishop and the Editors of

Life. Li brary Journa1, 11 (1962), 4186.

Ziff, Larzar. The American 1890's: Life and Times of a Lost Generation.

New York: Viking Press, 1966.