Anne Stevenson - Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop

As many readers of Elizabeth Bishop will know, excellent introductions to her work already exist in David Kalstones Becoming a Poet (1989) and Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil Estesss compendium, ElizabethBishopandHerArt (1983). So far in the 1990s, Victoria Harrison, Bonnie Costello and Lorrie Goldensohn in the United States have contributed thoughtful, scholarly studies to a galloping Bishop industry, while Seamus Heaney and James Fenton, in their lectures as Professors of Poetry at Oxford, have both singled out her work. In 1993, the publication of Brett Milliers detailed biography initiated what could be termed, I suppose, a stampede of Bishop-lovers to the Vassar archives. Milliers biography has meanwhile been amplified by an interesting (though rather less reliable) oral biography, Remembering ElizabethBishop, assembled by Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau (1994), and by a hefty selection of the poets letters edited by Robert Giroux and published in 1994 under the title OneArt.

My reason for heaping yet another book about Bishop on the pile rests on a twofold indebtedness. More than any other contemporary, Elizabeth Bishop opened my eyes to possibilities and directions for poetry I might never have explored without her example. I have long wanted to thank her. More heavily on my conscience weighs the burden of having written, over thirty years ago, an introduction to her work that she liked at the time but later could not approve. In 1962, when as a graduate student at the University of Michigan I undertook to contribute a volume on Elizabeth Bishop to the Twayne United States Authors Series, so little material relating to her life and work was available that I was reduced to writing to Miss Bishop herself for guidance. At the time she was living in Brazil, and the letters she wrote back to me, warmly and exhaustively answering my questions, were so exciting and yet so far beyond anything I was in those days capable of assimilating, that I am today embarrassed by the sketch I offered to Twayne in 1965.

Fortunately, owing to a personal mishap, the letters Elizabeth Bishop addressed to me in connection with that Twayne volume found their way in the 1970s to the Special Collections Library of Washington University, St Louis. There, in the 1980s, Kalstone, Harrison and other scholars were able to consult them and put them to more pertinent use than I could possibly have done in the middle 60s. When I began my first book, Elizabeth Bishop had published only two collections, North&South and AColdSpring; even when, in 1964, her New York agent sent me copies of the poems that later appeared in QuestionsofTravel, I was too young or too blindly intent on pursuing abstract ideas, to see how distinctly they marked a change of direction in her work.

Today, the ninety or so poems Elizabeth Bishop chose to publish in her lifetime plus some, like Exchanging Hats, that she suppressed are known to poetry readers throughout the English-speaking world. To some new readers, Bishop will be only a name. Others may have been taught to see her as a feminist or even lesbian poet. My object has been to suggest ways of reading Bishop uncategorically in the light of her insistence on looking at the world and finding there solid correlatives for the marvels, griefs and contradictions that shaped her personal geography. In order to focus my study on the continuities that over the years transfigured Bishops art, I have limited my discussion to her principal stories, essays and poems. Though she was a fine translator from French, Portuguese and Spanish, I have not tried to explain why. And though she published amusing (rather trenchant) verse tributes to Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound, I have not seen that attempting