The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop

First published: 1983

Type of work: Poetry

Form and Content

Elizabeth Bishop’s poems are noted for their precise visual details. Her vision has been called aerial, as it often presents a broad overview and then zeros in on details. The poems incorporate “thingness” more than any other quality: Bishop writes of the sea, travel, animals, clothes, sleeping, and waking up. Her poems insinuate that, through close observation of a thing, one will absorb the object or the object’s intrinsic meaning. Bishop’s descriptions of physical reality hint at a truth that cannot be seen. Her descriptions also serve as a filter through which one can see Bishop’s inner landscape; they are a way of dodging yet finally encountering a lost inward world.

Loss is a dominant motif in Bishop’s works, a motif accompanied by the theme of exile. These themes no doubt originated in her early loss of her father (Bishop was eight months old) and the subsequent breakdown and institutionalization of her mother when Elizabeth was only five. Bishop remained with her maternal grandparents after her mother’s hospitalization until her paternal grandparents took her in, a move that she remembered as a kidnapping. Although she undoubtedly began writing to exorcise herself of these early losses, she turned to poetry professionally through the influence of poet and mentor Marianne Moore. Moore’s independent lifestyle influenced Bishop even more than her artistic advice. The older woman’s career suggested that Bishop too could succeed in an art practiced primarily by men.

Emily Dickinson is Bishop’s “foremother,” in that both poets imply through physical description that the truth worth seeing cannot be confronted with physical eyes. Like Dickinson, Bishop rejects traditional religious consolations, yet her poems imply that patience in observing material reality will increase the likelihood of perceiving something beyond it. Because of this, she can be termed a religious poet.

The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 is indeed complete. Since the publication of The Complete Poems in 1969 and Geography III in 1976, other Bishop poems have been discovered. The 1983 edition includes fifty heretofore unpublished and uncollected poems. The collection is composed of nine parts: The first four are Bishop’s books—North & South (1946), Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring (1955), Questions of Travel (1965), and Geography III, and the other sections are “Uncollected Work (1969),” “New Poems (1979),” “Uncollected Poems,” “Poems Written in Youth,” and “Translations.”

North & South, her fist published volume, deals with maps and geographic locations. Deliberate or involuntary imprisonment is its major theme. A Cold Spring infuses her earlier concerns about nature and history with emotional and moral depth. Questions of Travel contains poems of childhood memories, fables and fairy-tales, imaginative journals, and nursery-rhyme descriptions of lunatic asylums. Also in this section are poems in the voice of Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

Part 4, “The Uncollected Work (1969),” contains the prose poems “The Hanging of a Mouse” and “Rainy Season: Sub-Tropics,” which use the tone of a children’s storyteller. The poems, among them “Song” and “Trouvee,” convey mystery despite their ordinary subjects. That section is followed by Bishop’s last book, Geography III, which contains some of her finest poems, such as “The Filling Station” and “One Art.” Geography III fully realizes two of her recurrent themes, feminism and loss. “New Poems (1979)” contains poems written just before Bishop’s death, such as “Santarem,” “North Haven,” “Pink Dog,” and “Sonnet.” This section is notable for its juxtaposition of the solemn elegy for Robert Lowell, “North Haven,” with the lighthearted “Pink Dog” and “Sonnet.” The sections “Uncollected Poems” and “Poems Written in Youth” follow. “Uncollected Poems” contains poems that Bishop did not think worthy of publication, such as the one surviving copy of “Pleasure Seas,” and one of her finest works, “Exchanging Hats.” This section also includes typical descriptive poems, such as “A Norther—Key West.” “Poems Written in Youth,” which shows the poet in an embryonic stage, also contains the themes of loss and nature. “To a Tree” lauds nature with what becomes typical self-deprecation, while “The Reprimand” deals with grief. The last part of the 1983 edition contains both previously published and newly discovered translations.

Summary

Elizabeth Bishop, who called herself a feminist long before the term became fashionable, understood women’s oppression and its concomitant masculine pretensions. “Roosters” rails against male “cockiness” generally and military power specifically. The roosters’ combative sallies and their treatment of the hens who are “courted and despised” are portrayed as senseless. “Roosters” begins by saying that violence is intrinsic to males, but the second half shows the roosters as products of violence as well as independently violent. Male brutality, the poem suggests, is also culturally conditioned.

Bishop’s feminism is strong in other poems as well. The intimidating animal in “The Moose” is a female. In “Exchanging Hats,” an “Aunt . . . with avernal eyes” stares with unnerving insight into a capering group. Bishop’s comments upon women’s subordinate position are often implied. “The Filling Station” indicates a woman’s influence by its plant, doily, and taboret, which pathetically try to make the greasy station attractive. The fact that the woman is anonymous and that one knows her only through stereotypical evidence comments indirectly on women’s derivative role. Bishop rebels against feminine stereotypes in “The Waiting Room,” in which the little girl anxiously focuses, like little boys, on her sexual identity instead of the traditional feminine concerns of men, money, or religion.

Although Bishop considered herself a feminist, she did not want to be grouped with women writers, as she thought art transcended gender. Despite this disclaimer, Bishop created a poetry that both conformed to and subverted patriarchal literary standards. For example, she rebelled against the Romantics’ feminization of nature. While she conformed to the male Romantics’ elevation of nature, she depicted nature as either masculine or asexual, never as “Mother Nature.”

Bishop resisted patriarchal literary traditions that could muffle her work, but she often borrowed from these same traditions. In her poems, however, she constantly implied that women are as important as men (“In the Waiting Room,” “The Filling Station,” “The Moose”), but she did not support a woman-centered ideology. Her poetry refutes all domination and supports minority viewpoints by presenting juxtaposing perspectives and a variety of voices. Bishop’s recognition of nature as “other” is an extension of feminism, with its emphasis on cooperative coexistence instead of male domination or absorption.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Elizabeth Bishop. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. Bloom collects the best critical views on Bishop’s work. The essays range from considerations of her complete canon to analyses of particular works.

Dodd, Elizabeth. The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. This study contains a discussion of how Bishop controls personal revelations by her poetry’s tone.

Merrin, Jeredith. An Enabling Humility: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Uses of Tradition. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990. This book contains an edifying chapter on Bishop’s subtle revolt against the patriarchal concepts of nineteenth century Romanticism.

Parker, Robert Dale. The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. The thesis of this book is that Bishop’s poetry illustrates the contemporary poet’s lack of faith in his or her ability to sustain the vocation. Also touches on her recognition of women’s marginalization. Here Parker shows how Bishop indicates a mother’s importance by the evidence that she leaves, rather than by a separate personality. He also notes how she subverts traditional women’s concerns by having her speakers concerned with themselves rather than with family or other stereotypical issues.

Schweik, Susan. A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Contains a thought-provoking chapter on the politics of war and gender in Bishop’s metaphors. Provides a thorough analysis of “The Rooster” which illustrates Bishop’s disdain for both war and masculine pomposity.

Travisano, Thomas J. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988. A thorough treatment of Bishop’s poetic development. Divides her poetic growth into three phases: an early phase dealing with prisons, a middle phase concerning travel, and a final phase treating loss.