Visits to St. Elizabeths by Elizabeth Bishop
"Visits to St. Elizabeths" is a poem by Elizabeth Bishop inspired by her visits to the St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Washington, D.C., where the modernist poet Ezra Pound was held. While Bishop was there as the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, her focus in the poem shifts from the political implications of Pound's imprisonment for treason to a more personal exploration of his humanity. The poem employs a structure reminiscent of the children's song "The House That Jack Built," which creates a rhythmic and repetitive quality that highlights the contrasts in Pound's situation, from honor to wretchedness.
The narrator reflects on the complexities of human experience, revealing empathy for the patient's plight while conveying the chaos and despair often associated with mental illness. As the poem unfolds, the adjectives describing the man change, illustrating the fluctuations of his condition and evoking a sense of both dignity and degradation. Ultimately, "Visits to St. Elizabeths" serves as a meditation on the dualities of human existence, prompting readers to consider the spectrum of human potential and suffering, all set against the backdrop of Pound's significant literary legacy.
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Visits to St. Elizabeths by Elizabeth Bishop
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1950 (collected in The Complete Poems, 1927-1979, 1983)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“Visits to St. Elizabeths” is the result of Bishop’s visits, while in Washington, D.C., as the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, to see the great modernist poet Ezra Pound, who had been incarcerated in this mental hospital as an alternative to conviction for treason; he had made purportedly pro-Fascist radio broadcasts on Italian radio during World War II. Bishop’s reaction, characteristically enough, has nothing to do with politics and focuses only on the man in the hospital, who is never named. Yet the poem seems to lose a great deal if the reader is unaware of the poetic stature of Ezra Pound (for some literary historians, the single most original figure of Anglo-American modernism, and at any rate a figure without whom the shape of twentieth century literature would have been vastly different). It helps to have a sense both of Pound’s literary grandeur and stature and of the circumstances to which he had been reduced. The narrator’s meditation involves a realization of both these extremes, of both the splendors and miseries of the poem’s central figure.
The poem is stylistically somewhat peculiar in that it takes a particular metrical prototype as the model which it adopts and then varies, namely the childhood add-on song, “The House That Jack Built.” The echo is made clear by Bishop’s repetition of its basic structure of one line, separated by a blank line from the next group of two, separated in turn from the next group of three, and so on to the final stanza of twelve lines. For example, the first reads, “This is the house of Bedlam,” the second, “This is the man/ that lies in the house of Bedlam.” Already the reader can recognize the reference to the British hospital for the insane at Bethlehem, called Bedlam, whose chaos before the reforms of the nineteenth century has been preserved in the lowercase use of the noun “bedlam.” The evocation is of lack of order; the man “lies” in this house, rather than, say, living there, as if slumped or quiescent, clearly not a fully functioning human.
As the poem progresses, details are added, but the adjectives applied to the man alter. At first he is “honored,” then he is “old,” “brave,” then “cranky,” “tedious,” and “busy,” and he ends up simply “wretched.” The crazy round of the madhouse is evoked in this alteration of adjectives, as it is in the repetitive, sing-song rhythm of the increasing numbers of lines and details. In reacting to one specific person’s situation, the narrator in this poem (essentially Bishop herself) seems to express a sense of human empathy that is sometimes lacking in Bishop’s more cerebral poems, a realization both of the heights to which individual humans can rise and of the depths to which they can sink. The reader may be left thinking that the wretchedness of this person is not totally unmerited, a situation that may or may not correspond to one’s understanding of the historical Pound but which at any rate makes the contemplation of the situation described in the poem possible rather than merely unbearable.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. Elizabeth Bishop: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.
Boland, Eavan. “An Unromantic American.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 14 (Summer, 1988): 73-92.
Fountain, Gary. Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.
Kirsch, Adam. The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets: Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.
MacMahon, Candace, ed. Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography, 1927-1979. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980.
Millier, Brett C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Motion, Andrew. Elizabeth Bishop. Wolfeboro, N.H.: Longwood, 1986.
Parker, Robert Dale. The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Schwartz, Lloyd. That Sense of Constant Readjustment: Elizabeth Bishop “North & South.” New York: Garland, 1987.
Schwartz, Lloyd, and Sybil P. Estess, eds. Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983.
Travisano, Thomas J. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988.
Wylie, Diana E. Elizabeth Bishop and Howard Nemerov: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983.