John Peale Bishop

• Born: May 21, 1892
• Birthplace: Charles Town, West Virginia
• Died: April 4, 1944
• Place of death: Hyannis, Massachusetts

Other literary forms

The literary reputation that John Peale Bishop retains is connected almost solely to his work as a poet, but he also was involved in journalism as an editor for Vanity Fair (1922), and he wrote for that magazine in the 1920’s. He produced a volume of short stories, Many Thousands Gone, in 1931 and a novel, Act of Darkness, in 1935.

Achievements

John Peale Bishop was a member of the literary establishment of New York in the early 1920’s but spent most of the decade living in Europe. He never won a major prize for his work, but in 1931, his short story “Many Thousands Gone” won the Scribner’s Magazine annual short-story prize. He was respected as a critic, and in 1940, he worked as the poetry reviewer for the periodical The Nation.

In 1943, Bishop was honored by the appointment as resident fellow at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., but ill health forced him to resign; he died soon after.

Biography

John Peale Bishop was born in Charles Town, West Virginia, to a family of substantial wealth. He began writing poetry in his late teen years; Harper’s Weekly published a poem by him in 1912, a year before he entered Princeton University. He came to university somewhat later than most because of serious illness in his late youth. At Princeton, he was part of the literary coterie that included F. Scott Fitzgerald. After graduation in 1917, he earned a commission in the U.S. Army and served until the end of World War I.

In 1920, he became a prominent member of the New York City literary circle, working as an editor at Vanity Fair as well as writing poems, reviews, and comic pieces. He married Margaret Hutchins in 1922, and they went off to tour Europe. In 1924, they returned to New York, and Bishop worked in the office of Paramount Pictures. He also contributed occasional work to New York magazines. Dissatisfied with intellectual life in the United States, he returned to Europe, living in a chateau in rural France, but he continued to write for American publications. While there he published a book of short stories and a book of poems, Now with His Love.

Bishop returned to the United States in 1933, living for a short time in Connecticut, then in New Orleans. In 1935, he settled on Cape Cod, where he wrote some of his best poems. The December, 1940, death of F. Scott Fitzgerald was remembered in “The Hours,” and a series of somber, sonorous poems followed. Constantly troubled by serious illness, Bishop worked when he was able, in New York in the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and in editorial work. In 1942, his health forced him to return to Cape Cod. In 1943, he tried to work at the Library of Congress with the poet Archibald MacLeish but suffered a heart attack soon after his arrival. He returned to the Cape, where he continued to write poetry. He died in Hyannis Hospital on April 4, 1944.

Analysis

The reputation of poets is often fragile, dependent on changes in taste for certain themes, tonalities, and technical enthusiasms. This is particularly true of John Peale Bishop (who was ruefully aware of it), for he was rarely chosen for poetry anthologies and of little interest to the critics.

His major limitations were his lack of a singular voice or an individual style. His early poetry was influenced by several nineteenth century poets, including John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, and his later work revealed an enthusiasm for the twentieth century poets William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. His poems are often clever but lack originality (a touchstone for artistic praise) and that indefinable artistic sense of power that marks the great poet. His later poetry, however, often manages interesting ideas and possesses a laconic tone that is attractive.

“Speaking of Poetry”

The first poem in his 1933 collection Now with His Love uses a central problem of William Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice (pr. 1604, pb. 1622; revised 1623) as a metaphor for the relation of poetry to ordinary life. How can Desdemona, so civilized and cultivated, so delicate and fastidious, be attracted to the rough animality of Othello? Unlike most twentieth century lyric poets, Bishop does not quite answer the question, although the poem is reminiscent of the problem poems of Yeats and W. H. Auden in which some final solution is reached.

Desdemona represents, for Bishop, the intellect, the world of European culture, restraint, and the feminine, while Othello represents the emotions, the dark uncivilized African, the masculine. “For though Othello had his blood from kings/ his ancestry was barbarous, his ways African,/ his speech uncouth.” Bishop explores the nature of their coming together in a way that suggests that such is how art is made, in a coming together of the traditions and disciplines of the form wedded to the unconscious, the wayward, dark aspects of the poetic imagination.

It is a tonally tough poem, cool in its comparison of the act of artistic creation with the sexual attraction of Desdemona “small and fair,/ delicate as a grasshopper” and Othello, “his weight resilient as a Barbary stallion’s.” All the trappings of “poetic” language that mar so many of Bishop’s early poems are left behind here for an informal, angular verse, with intimate conversational simplicity. The question of how culture is related to ordinary life was common with Bishop and shows up most successfully in his later work in Minute Particulars in “The Freize” and “Your Chase Had a Beast in View,” in which the artist is praised for the ability to bring order and meaning out of humanity’s base existence.

Now with His Love

Bishop had a wide range of subject matter, and in Now with His Love, he faces the horror of his service in World War I, juxtaposing the innocence of daily life behind the battle lines with the existential facts of daily slaughter. His gift for the description of the indifferently beautiful world of nature makes the facts of life even more intensely sad. The dead are buried close to their billets in “In the Dordogne”:

   the young men rotted   under the shadow of the tower   in a land of small clear silent streams   where the coming on of evening is   the letting down of blue and azure veils   over the clear and silent streams   delicately bordered by poplars.

The senselessness of the fighting is conveyed not by heroic posturing or heightened emotion but rather by a distasteful rigor and a recognition of the sad foolishness of the idealizations of the young men. Relentless in tone and intelligent candor, bone thin in its refusal to glorify, it is war poetry of considerable power.

“Young Men Dead” is a powerful evocation of three boys slain in France, one who might have become a formidable man in time, one a great lover “who had so many dears/ Enjoyed to the core,” and “Newlin who hadn’t one/ To answer his shy desire.” However different they may be, they are “blanketed in the mould.” The emotional tightness of the poem, the terse bleakness of the memory is brought to a deadening conclusion in the muted admission that “I who have most reason/ Remember them only when the sun/ is at his dullest season.”

“Fiametta” and “Metamorphoses of M”

These two poems are also from Now with His Love. Bishop wrote love lyrics from early in his career, but it was only in his later years that he was consistently able to find an economical, intensely direct way to deal with the subject. He did, however, show signs of power early on, as in “Fiametta,” written in the early 1920’s. The poem is metrically very strict for the first two six-line stanzas; the final stanza is somewhat looser and provides a pleasing contrast. It is a poem that displays how technically skilled Bishop was at an early age. It is a simple song of outright adoration of female beauty, full of color and sensitive evocations of sexual excitement: “In a gown the color of flowers;/ Her small breasts shine through the silken stuff/ Like raindrops after showers.” The poem is not without a glint of wit: “Whatever her flaws, my lady/ Has no fault in her young body.”

In 1933, this sexual adoration appears again, with even greater success, in “Metamorphoses of M.” This poem is strongly reminiscent of Yeats but remains a successful evocation of adoration of the female. In this love poem written on the morning after a night of sexual pleasure, the lover contemplates the beauty fit for Venetian craftsmen to adorn. “I could have sworn Venetian artisans/ Had all night been awake, painting in gold,/ To set your beauty on appropriate heels.”

Bishop, deeply lettered in literature and history, often subtly infuses his poetry with cultural references, and William Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is hinted at in “Your beauty is not used” as the lover marvels at the unspoiled perfection of the loved one. There is also a touch of the Metaphysical poets in his logic-chopping consideration of the woman, sexually active, yet so beautiful that a kind of virginity surrounds her. “Though you have lain/ A thousand nights upon my bed, you rise/ Always so splendidly renewed that I have thought” that “even the unicorn” would be “so marvelled by virginity/ That he would come, trotting and mild,/ To lay his head upon your fragrant lap/ And be surprised.”

“A Subject of Sea Change”

The longer poems, gathered in The Collected Poems of John Peale Bishop under “Uncollected Poems, 1937-1945,” are examples of his ability to sometimes, but not always, organize his work with a happy conjunction of technical and aesthetic success. Sea Change was the name of the house he had built on Cape Cod, the name coming from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pr. 1611, pb. 1623) in a passage describing the act of drowning, an act in which all is changed forever. In the poem “A Subject of Sea Change,” the speaker reflects on life, public and private, as he looks out to the shore and the rolling sea. Bishop had considerable sensitivity in the description of nature, and the beginning section places the house within the beach landscape. “I have built my house amid sea-bitten green,/ Among the pitch pines of a dispersed wood.” The time is ominous, that of World War II: “I hear the great bombs drop.” Humanity’s limited hold on time, and its failures, are put into the context of the long run, of the ability to accept failure and responsibility, but to maintain a sense of life having meaning.

   Time is man’s tragic responsibility   And on his back he bears   Both the prolific and destroying years.   . . . he must surround each act   With scruples that will hold intact   Not merely his own, but human, dignity.

“The Hours”

Something of similar thoughtfulness and tender passion can be seen in “The Hours,” the elegy written on the death of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Cape Cod landscape is used with relentless force in pastoral sympathy. “The sky is overcast,/ And shuddering cold as snow the shoreward blast./ And in the marsh, like a sea astray, now/ Waters brim.” John Milton’s “Lycidas” (1638) may be the inspiration behind the poem, but Milton had never met the young man who was the subject of that poem, nor had the boy done anything significant with his life. By contrast, Bishop was an intimate of Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald was one of the finest American novelists of his time. The poem has an intimacy that Milton’s poem lacks: “None had such promise then, and none/ Your scapegrace wit or your disarming grace.” The poem concludes in acceptance of eternal loss. “I cannot pluck you bays,/ Though here the bay grows wild. For fugitive/ As surpassed fame the leaves this sea-wind frays/ Why should I promise what I cannot give?”

Bibliography

Arrowsmith, William. “An Artist’s Estate.” Hudson Review 2 (1949): 118-127. A short account of the Bishop poetry and its relation to early twentieth century literary movements.

Bier, Jesse. A Critical Biography of John Peale Bishop. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1957. This thesis for Princeton University is one of the rare biographical works on Bishop.

Bratcher, James T. “’Chickimee Craney Crow’: A Game as Explanation of an Obscure Poem by John Peale Bishop.” Notes and Queries 55, no. 4 (December, 2008): 481-484. The author uses chickimee craney crow, a game played in the South in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to explain the poem “A Charm.”

Frank, Joseph. “The Achievement of John Peale Bishop.” Minnesota Review 2 (1962): 325-344. Bishop often used mythological themes in his poetry; Frank spends considerable time on that aspect of the work but also examines the later poetry with considerable sensitivity.

Hyman, Stanly Edgar. “Notes on the Organic Unity of John Peale Bishop.” Accent 4 (1949): 102-113. A comment on the complexity of some of the poetry.

Spindler, Elizabeth Carroll. John Peale Bishop: A Biography. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 1980. Includes bibliographical references, index.

Tate, Allen. “A Note on Bishop’s Poetry.” Southern Review 1 (1935): 357-364. Tate, a good poet and distinguished critic, was Bishop’s closet literary confidant and a personal friend; his judgment of the Bishop work is probably the best available.

Tate, Allen, and John Peale Bishop. The Republic of Letters in America: The Correspondence of John Peale Bishop and Allen Tate. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981. The sparsity of criticism of Bishop’s work can, in part, be alleviated by his long personal and critical correspondence with fellow poet Allen Tate. They discuss the problem of making art in the United States.

White, Robert Lee. John Peale Bishop. 1966. Reprint. Detroit: Gale Group, 1983. A widely accessible, full-length study of the poet. It is sensible and thorough, dealing with his life and his full range of literary endeavors. A good source for student study.