Dickinson College Dickinson Scholar Faculty and Staff Publications By Year Faculty and Staff Publications 2014 Bishop's Correspondence Siobhan K. Phillips Dickinson College Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.dickinson.edu/faculty_publications Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, and the Poetry Commons Recommended Citation Phillips, Siobhan. "Bishop's Correspondence." In The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Angus Cleghorn and Jonathan Ellis, 155-168. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014. This article is brought to you for free and open access by Dickinson Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. IO SIOBHAN PHILLIPS Bishop's Correspondence When Anne Stevenson began the first full-length study of Bishop's poetry in the early 1960s, she wrote to her subject for clarification, and the inquiry yielded almost a decade of epistolary exchange (see Ellis, "Between," for a full analysis). One of Bishop's responses includes an explanation of the poet's aesthetic ideal. "What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it," she writes, "is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration" (Pr 414). Justly famous, the passage reap• pears in editions of Bishop running from a 198 3 volume called Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, when Bishop's fame was only beginning to grow, to the 2011 collection of Prose, when she was recognized as the most impor• tant American poet of the late twentieth century (Orr). Changing citations of "the Darwin letter," however, show developments during that span.