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ELIZABETH BISHOP

Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there...No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?

Born in Worcester, Mass in 1911, Elizabeth Bishop effectively became an orphan at the age of five,when, her father having died in her infancy, her psychotic mother was committed to a sanatorium. Bishop was brought up by her Nova Scotian grandparents and subsequently by her paternal grandparents in Massachusetts. She never saw her mother, who died the year her daughter graduated from Vassar in 1935, again. By this time, Bishop had already begun the poetic career for which she had known from childhood she was destined. She was able, with private means, to travel widely. Reinforcing the rootless pattern of her childhood, she set off for Europe, later settling at different times in New York, Brazil and Florida. Her poetic mentor and protector was Marianne Moore. She also maintained a close friendship with the poet Robert Lowell. She struggled with alcoholism, with non-alcohol related blackouts and other disturbing symptoms all her life. The years she spent in Brazil were illuminated by her love for Lota de Macedo Soares, with whom she lived, and who would commit suicide. Bishop eventually returned to America, and from 1970, lived with Alice Methfessel. Private both as a person and as a poet, and never histrionic, Bishop was a highly perceptive chronicler of individual consciousness, using close observation of the physical world and its geography to establish devastatingly understated correlatives for the confusions, sorrows and contradictions of her strained emotional life. How we may know and relate to one another is a constant theme, as is the nature and purpose of the imagination. Our mirror-like connection with the natural world, including both new and familiar landscapes, links all five of her brief collections. A recurring question is the meaning of ‘home’. All touch on her pervasive sense of loss. Her poetic output was both slow and small. In a review of her last poems, the critic Alfred Corn wrote ‘a perfected transparence of expression, warmth of tone, and a singular blend of sadness and good humor, of pain and acceptance--a radiant patience few people ever achieve and few writers ever successfully render. The poems are works of philosophic beauty and calm, illuminated by that "laughter in the soul" that belongs to the best part of the comic genius.’ She wrote essays and some beautiful short stories about childhood. Many wonderful letters survive her. She died in 1979.

poem of the day

ALL TRUTHS WAIT IN ALL THINGS from SONG OF MYSELF

30
All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
(What is less or more than a touch?)

Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

(Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,
Only what nobody denies is so.)

A minute and a drop of me settle my brain,
I believe the soggy clods shall become lovers and lamps,
And a compend of compends is the meat of a man or woman,
And a summit and flower there is the feeling they have for each other,
And they are to branch boundlessly out of that lesson until it
becomes omnific,
And until one and all shall delight us, and we them.

31
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg
of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits,
grains, esculent roots,
And am stucco'd with quadrupeds and birds all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
But call any thing back again when I desire it.

In vain the speeding or shyness,
In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,
In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its own powder'd bones,
In vain objects stand leagues off and assume manifold shapes,
In vain the ocean settling in hollows and the great monsters lying low,
In vain the buzzard houses herself with the sky,
In vain the snake slides through the creepers and logs,
In vain the elk takes to the inner passes of the woods,
In vain the razor-bill'd auk sails far north to Labrador,
I follow quickly, I ascend to the nest in the fissure of the cliff.

Bishop on poetry and creativity

They ( certain of Lowell's poems)...have that sure feeling, as if you'd been in a stretch...when everything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry - or not material, seemed to be poetry, and all the past was illuminated in long shafts here and there, like a long-waited for sunrise. If only one could see eveerything that way all the time! It seems to me it's the whole purpose of art, to the artist (not to the audience) - that rare feeling of control, illumination - life is all right, for the time being.

What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

that strange kind of modesty that I think one feels in almost [everything] contemporary one really likes—Kafka, say, or Marianne, or even Eliot, and Klee and Kokoschka and Schwitters…. Modesty, care, space, a sort of helplessness but determination at the same time."

If a poem catches a student's interest at all, he or she should damned well be able to look up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary...All flower names can be looked up, certainly - some students even SEE flowers still, although I know only too well that TV has weakened the sense of reality so that very few students see anything the way it is in real life.

There is no 'split'. Dreams, works of art, glimpses of the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy...catch a periphersl vision of whatever i is one can never relaly see full-face but that seems enormously important. I can't believe we are wholly irrational - and I do admire Darwin! But reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful and solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic ... and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown.

On reading what I've got on hand I find I'm really a minor William Wordsworth - at least, I don't know anyone else who seems to be such a nature lover.

The window this evening was covered with hundreds of long, shining drops of rain, laid on the glass which was covered with steam on the inside. I tried to look out, but could not. Instead I realized that I could look into the drops, like so many crystal balls. Each bore traces of a relative or friend: several weeping faces slid away from mine; water plants and fish floated within other drops; watery jewels, leaves and insects magnified, and strangest of all, horrible enough to make me step quickly away, was one large drop containing a lonely, magnificent human eye, wrapped in its own tear.

I've always felt that I've written poetry more by not writing it than writing it.

It's a question of using the poet's proper material...i.e., immediate intense physical reactions, a sense of metaphor and decoration in everything - to express something not of them, something I suppose, spiritual. But it proceeds from the material, the material eaten out with acid, pulled down from underneath, made to perform and always kept in order, in its place....

There seemed to be one thing common to all their "primitive" writing, as I suppose it might be called, in contrast to primitive painting: its slipshodiness and haste. Where primitive painters will spend months or years, if necessary, putting in every blade of grass and building up brick walls in low relief, the primitive writer seems in a hurry to get it over with. Another thing was the almost complete lack of detail. The primitive painter loves detail and lingers over it and emphasizes it at the expense of the picture as a whole. But if the writers put them in, the details are often impossibly or wildly inappropriate, sometimes revealing a great deal about the writer without furthering the matter in hand at all. Perhaps it all demonstrates the professional writer's frequent complaint that painting is more fun than writing.

on the conduct of life

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres?

My outlook is pessimistic. I think we are still barbarians, barbarians who commit a hundred indecencies and cruelties every day of our lives.... but I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy, - to make life endurable and to keep ourselves 'new, tender, quick'.

I think ( Mary McCarthy's) never felt very real, and that's been her trouble. She's always pretending to be something-or-other and never quite convincing herself or other people. When I knew her well I was always torn between being furious with her and being touched by her - because in those days her pretensions were so romantic and sad.

What childishness is it that while there's breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around?

One reason why I am content to leave New York for good, everyody is so intent on using everybody else that there is no room for friendship any more.

One can use one's life as material - one does, anyway - but these letters - aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permission - IF you hadn't changed them.....etc. But art just isn't worth that much. I keep remembering Hopkins' marvellous letter to Bridges about the idea of a 'gentleman' being the highest thing ever conceived - higher than a 'Christian', even, certainly than a poet. It is not being 'gentle' to use personal, tragic anguished letters that way - it's cruel.

The armoured car of dreams, contrived to let us do so many a dangerous thing.

I had infinitely rather approach such things from the Christian viewpoint myself—but the trouble is I've never been able to find the books, except Herbert.

on her inner struggles

...the drinking and working both seem to have improved miraculously. Well no, it isn't miraculous really - it is almost entirely due to Lota's good sense and kindness.

When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.

I felt frightened for (Dylan Thomas) and depressed. Yet I found him so tremendously sympathetic at the same time.....Why do some poets manage to get by and live to be malicious old bores like Frost or - probably - pompus old ones like Yeats, or crazy old ones like Pound - and some just don't!... but (Thomas')poetry has that desperate win-or-lose-all quality, of course, - and of course it eliminates everything from life except something almost beyond human supportability after a while....Poets should have self-doubts left out of their systems completely as one can see most of the surviving ones seem to have. But look at poor Cal - and Marianne, who hangs on just by the skin of her teeth and the most elaborate paranoia I've ever heard of. And of course it isn't just poets. We're all wretched and half the time or three-quarters I think it is a thoroughly disgusting world - and then the horror vanishes for a while, mercifully. But in my own minor way I know enough about drink and destruction.

I think you ( Lowell) said a while ago that 'I'd laugh you to scorn' over some conversation you and J had about how to protect yourself against solitude and ennui - but indeed I wouldn't. That's just the kind of suffering I'm most at home with and helpless about, I'm afraid, and what with two days of fog and alarmingly low tides, I've really got it bad... the boats bringing the men back from the quarries look like convict ships and I've just been indulging myself in a nightmare of finding a gasping mermaid under one of those exposed docks - you know, trying to tear the musseld off the piles for something to eat - horrors.

I think almost the last straw here is the hairdresse when I said yes, I was an orphan, she said 'Kind of awful, ain't it, plowing through life alone'. So now I can't walk downstairs in the morning or upstairs at night without feeling I'm plowing. There's no place like New England...

Meticulous attention, a method of escaping from intolerable pain...(is) something I've just begun to realise myself.

(Once when I (Helen Vendler) told Elizabeth Bishop thatI was feeling depressed about something or other, she asked me whether I had ever read the letters of Sydney Smith, the English clergyman and wit of the early nineteenth century. When I said I hadn't, she took her own two volumes down from the shelf and pressed them on me, saying ) I've found that he's a sure cure for melancholy - you have only to read him and you feel better. (The remark was characteristic; she knew as well as I that there is no sure cure for melancholy, but that literary people are cheered up by style more than by anything else. And. perhaps, by brisk letters. Bishop loved Jane Carlyle's letters for their sharp intelligence; and she contrasted them with the letters of Hart Crane and Edna St Millay : of the latter two books she says ) I don't know which is more depressing, I suppose his is, it was all over quicker - but she isn't quite so narcissistic and has some sense of humour at least.

All my life I have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper - just running down the edges of different countries and continents, 'looking for something'.

I left Brazil with a very heavy heart and I hope never to see Rio again....I feel now as if I'd been living in a completely false world all the time - not false, but that noone ever liked me, really, or not many people, and all of them totally misunderstood the strength of the bonds between Lola and me.

critics on Bishop

Anne Stevenson

more than any other contemporary, Elizabeth Bishop opened my eyes to possibilities and directions for poetry

she (does) convince us that ordinary life is the most astonishing and terrible thing there is.

In some ways,she and Robert Lowell believed, they were both descended from the New England Transcendalists.
One of the things she could do best was write metaphorically, even symbolically, without appearing to do so. What is most fascinating about the role of animals and birds in her poetry is their ambivalent status both as natural creatures and, as we have seen, various types of emblem.

These wonderfully realised meditations do indeed hold up a mirror to nature, yet (and this..is why the poems are so hypnotic) the mind that speculates and reflects in them also terribly desires to be reflected.

Bishop approached the unknown like a tantalizing, perpetually elusive creative territory; imaginatively, she wanted to live nowhere else.

Faustina'proceeds exactly in accordance with Bishop's rules for creating bartoque art : her mind thinks the drama as it happens, reporting in the present tense.

The entire corpus of her work has to be understood as the record of one hypersensitive person's cautious, watchful, self-conscious inching towards the truth. It asks to be read as autobiography, but as an autobiography told from the 'inside looking out'

A factor at least as inhibiting to ElizabethBishop as her relentless truth-seeking was her apparent inability to write very much without pursuing the line of ontological-cum-epistemological questioning...(she) didn't, in general, approve of academics who tried to explain or take over poetry, and she positively loathed aesthetic arguments, agreeing with Wordsworth that if you can't say something in every day words, it is probably not worth saying.

...She could only speak truthfully about being somewhere, at a certain time.

Which is the mirror in these geographical imaginings, the poet or the geography...did the poet looking for herself in the landscape...expect to find an image of herself 'out there'? Or did she realise that the act of looking is always reflective?
Acting according to an aesthetic ruke she had laid down for herself in her late twenties, she had more than succeeded...in drawing something 'spiritual' out of her 'material', and in so doing, had neither boweed to the doctrines of a religious faith nor abandoned her pracical curiosity about the world. A modern transcendalist? Yes, perhaps. Yet by faithfully adhering first to her material she had single-handedly renewed, hardened and refreshed - with her commion-sense wit - that profoundly entrnche American tradition.

For Bishop, who rarely felt at ease in the world and for whom living was sometimes torture, a life of freedom to be ordinary was a crypto-dream she only rarely realised.

Seamus Heaney

Later on I would find a different kind of accuracy, a moral down-to-earthness to which I responded deeply and always will, in the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, a poetry where a New Testament sensibility suffers and absorbs the shock of the new century's barbarism. Then later again, in the pure consequence of Elizabeth Bishop's style..

..she never allows the formal delights of her art to mollify the hard realities of her subjects.

James Merrill

Of all the splendid and curious works belonging to my time, these are the poems that I love best and tire of least.

Helen Vendler

The odd thing about Bishop's mind is that the pleasurable visual incongruity...always set her to asking 'Why?'. Though there is no real answer to that question (except in her wonderful poem 'The Filling Station', which offers thetheological answer 'Somebody loves us all'), Bishop needs always to understand, by asking 'Why?' the reason for her own attraction to the unsettling, the prepsterous and the 'mistaken' ....- about the bayishness that is part of her own sensuality, the romping comedy that is part of her aestheticism, the comic decorativeness... that she superimposes on the tragic.

(She has) a remarkable commitment to exactness, and her primary mode is description

Chase Twichell

Meghan O'Rourke

her poetry evokes powerful, intimate feelings without devolving into mere self-revelation. Bishop chooses a path of aesthetic discretion at a time when many of her peers were pursuing, to great acclaim, confessional disclosure...(she) did not, in fact, refuse to put her most passionate, unprocessed feelings to the page. Instead she used reticence as a tool to lay bare deep feelings...it wasn't concealment that made Bishop the poet she is ; it was her quest for exact expression... she carved out an original niche, a poetics of subtle observation. Bishop writes about things.

The adjectives are transformative rather than redundant, because they are deployed with such unorthodox precision .. what we see and what is seen are inexrtricably fused..she is writing about her perceptions of the world - which is another thing altogether than writing about her feelings.

Her voice has an unmistakable moral clarity - paradoxically derived from her ability to evoke uncertainty...perhaps the most crucial word in Bishop's vocabulary is 'or', which she uses to turn self-revision into an aesthetic ideal.
Even Bishop's more intimate poems don't count testimont - or witness - as their primary virtue. Instead, she was a powerful exemplar of a truth-telling that involved the reader in the artist's own experience of coming to understand that all truth is slippery and constantly in the process of revising itself.

Robert Lowell

John Asbery

She is a writer's writer

(Her subject is the way we are) part-thing and part-thought.

Michael Benigni

It is this tug towards the oracular imagination, the sudden wellling up of the bardic or sublime speaking voice, that gives Bishop her unique and subtle appeal for many contemporary readers.

Langdon Hammer

Carole Doreski

James Fenton

fatalism can be found elsewhere in the poetry, lurking for instance in one of the "Songs for a Colored Singer":

Lullaby.
Let nations rage,
Let nations fall.
The shadow of the crib makes an enormous cage
upon the wall.

She seems really to have believed in that cage, that shadow of the crib, that fate, and to have counted her periods of happiness as a kind of remission.

Crashaw.... was already a hero, and Herbert—from whom Moore herself had borrowed—had a special significance for Bishop. Later, writing to Moore from Key West, she causes her friend some amusement by saying: "The Negroes have such soft voices and such beautifully tactful manners—I suppose it is farfetched, but their attitude keeps reminding me of the tone of George Herbert: 'Take the gentle path,' etc."

She was a poet's poet (John Ashbery called her a writer's writer's writer) but she was not a lesbian's lesbian.

She cherished a long-standing aversion to a certain generation of women writers, what she called the "our beautiful old silver" school of female writing: Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West. She thought they were always boasting about how "nice" they were: "They have to make quite sure that the reader is not going to mis-place them socially, first—and that nervousness interferes with what they think they'd like to say."

As far as one can tell, religious belief was by then, for Bishop, a thing of the fairly distant past, but religious sensibility stayed with her in her poetry, partly because among her models were Herbert and Crashaw.

People sometimes wrote that Bishop's poetry would be unthinkable without the example of Marianne Moore. I don't quite understand what they mean. It's not the influence I would deny, only the unthinkability. There are aspects of the later Auden that are unthinkable without the influence of Moore. But considering that Bishop's career was nurtured by Moore, and that the early poetry was submitted to her for vetting, that Moore had a powerful, definite personality and that Moore's mother was even more powerful and definite, what is remarkable about Bishop's first volume of poems is, rather, its independence of spirit.

bibliography

Poetry

North and South (1946)
Poems: North and South—A Cold Spring (1955)
Poems (1956)
Questions of Travel (1965)
The Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon (1968)
The Complete Poems (1969)
Poem (1973)
Geography III (1977)
The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (1983)
Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (2006)

Prose

Brazil (1962)
The Collected Prose (1984)
One Art: Letters (1993)

Short Stories

Gwendolyn
In The Village
The Sea and its Shore
In Prison

Letters

ed.Robert Giroux. One Art. The Selected Letters of Elizabeth Bishop

Biographies

Brett Millier. Elizabeth Bishop : Life And The Memory Of It
Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau. Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, An Oral Biography

Critical Studies

Anne Stevenson. Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop
Victoria Harrison. Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy
Seamus Heaney. The Redress of Poetry
Seamus Heaney. The Government Of The Tongue
James Fenton. The Strength of Poetry
Robert Lowell. Collected Prose
ed.Harold Bloom. Elizabeth Bishop. Modern Critical Views
Lorrie Goldensohn. Elizabeth Bishop :The Biography of a Poetry
Carole Doreski. Elizabeth Bishop: The Restraints of Language
Bonnie Costello. Elizabeth Bishop : Questions of Mastery
ed.Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P.Estees.Elizabeth Bishop And Her Art
David Kalstone. Becoming A Poet : Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell