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This lecture discusses form, which is a term that has multiform meanings and is contradictory. It looks at the sense of form found in the works of Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anne Stevenson. Form is not simply as a matter of formal technique, but as an object in a tradition that goes back to Victorian aestheticism's playful commodifications of its own formal pleasures. It states that the sense of elegy may be greater or lesser, depending on the poem.

This chapter considers changing conceptions of the art object when theorizations of framed, airless art enter the post-war era as adaptable and consumable “styles” competing with one another in the marketplace. With Vincente Minnelli’s blockbuster film, An American in Paris (1951), setting the stage, late modernist texts about frameless, counterfeit, or bad art—William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), Elizabeth Bishop’s North & South (1946)—grapple with the idea that kitsch is more egalitarian than high modern culture because for kitsch to work it must value the spectator’s experience. Granting this interdependent relationship between mass culture and high art, both Gaddis and Bishop use the relationship between avant-garde and kitsch to develop a “neo” rearguard aesthetic, one that follows Stein’s and Lewis’s insistence on the spectator’s irrelevance to the art object’s meaning but situates it differently as an “aesthetic of criticism” for the midcentury’s increasingly corporate culture. Defining art objects in relation to popular culture, they consider how the frame of an art object could work to distinguish high art from popular culture, while they also debate the role of different classes of spectators.

This chapter examines Elizabeth Bishop's interest in narrative and time as reflected in her poetry. Drawing on some of her poems such as ‘Cape Breton’, ‘The Prodigal’, ‘The Shampoo’ and ‘The Riverman’, it highlights Bishop's need to orientate herself spatially and her concern for temporality in her work. It also considers Bishop's awareness of the ‘other’ time of memory which intersects with her narrative, how alcoholism inhibited her productivity, her practice of painting and its connection to her ‘skewed time sense’. In addition, it looks at Bishop's period of psychoanalysis with Dr Ruth Foster in New York and her interest in the latter's theory about colour and dreaming. The chapter also reflects on her travel to South America, with reference to her turn to prose in her early years in Brazil.

During the 1930s, Elizabeth Bishop made two trips to Europe, the first from July 1935 until June 1936, and the second from June to December 1937. Bishop's first voyage triggered an intense physical reaction in her, especially when she was in the company of other people, and seems to have produced in her an intense self-consciousness. In her poem ‘The Man on the Raft’, she mentioned the ‘great Baroque circles’ made by the boat she rode. This chapter examines Bishop's travels to Europe and the way she encodes her intimate life in her poetry. It analyses the poems she wrote based on her experiences in Europe, her interest in art and architecture, the role of maps in her early childhood, and her ideas about geography and history as well as psychoanalysis. It also considers the influence of surrealism on her poems.

This chapter examines the topics covered when poets Anne Stevenson and Elizabeth Bishop started corresponding with each other in 1963. The letters sent between the two authors depict their common interest in several topics such as visual art and their passion for music. The correspondents began when Stevenson wrote to another poet named Marianne Moore informing the latter of her fear that Bishop might oppose Stevenson's practice of professionalized criticism. After Moore reached out to Bishop and told the author about Stevenson's plan of publishing a collection of literary works such as poems, the poet sent a letter to Stevenson encouraging her to pursue her goal. In the letter sent by Bishop to Stevenson, Bishop expressed her amusement for Stevenson's compliments for her works and justified one's distrust of academic criticism.

This chapter examines how the contours of American literature have changed over time by focusing on the shifting geospatial dynamics associated with the American South. In particular, it juxtaposes South America with the American South in order to highlight the historically variable nature of their interrelationship and the complicated ways in which these domains have intersected over time. The chapter first considers how the American South was imagined in the writings of William Bartram, William Gilmore Simms, and José Martí before discussing the notions of southern “regionalism” and pseudo-geography in the works of Zora Neale Hurston and Elizabeth Bishop. It also analyzes the fiction of William Faulkner and Frederick Barthelme.

This chapter examines the works of American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Many critics have categorized her as either an epigone of Marianne Moore or another in the line of female imagists but her best poems show her to be an epistemological poet in the tradition of William Wordsworth and S. T Coleridge. This chapter argues that Bishop's poems pose essential questions about the relationship between experience and knowledge, between what is empirically ascertainable and what must be deducted or inferred.

The chapter explores the ways in which a metaphor central to Romanticism, that of ‘air’, reappears in the work of 20th-century poets. The metaphor is suggestive because of its multi-faceted associations. In Hart Crane's ‘The Broken Tower’, the poet is said to allegorise the Romantic tradition as the ‘tribunal monarch of the air’: awe-inspiring but, in the end, not inhibiting Crane's own inspiration. Shelley rhymes ‘air’ with ‘despair’, as if to keep in view the proximity of inspiration and dejection, and subsequent writers such as Wallace Stevens have a comparably double understanding of what Stevens calls ‘the mere air’. For Stevens, who is central to the chapter, the ‘air’ represents a poetic present both different from and imbued by the Romantic. Other post-Romantic poets whose work is discussed include Yeats (responding to Shelley and Wordsworth), Elizabeth Bishop (responding especially to Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Hemans), Adrienne Rich (responding to Blake and Wordsworth), and Sylvia Plath (responding to Coleridge). All are seen as sustaining even as they qualify and even interrogate Romanticism.

Considering her poetics from a naturalist lens, this chapter underscores Elizabeth Bishop’s negative capability. As Bishop writes, ‘reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations…—and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one…sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details…sliding giddily off into the unknown’. This figure can also be seen as the poet in what Keats calls ‘the Penetralium of mystery’, ‘capable of being in uncertainties…without any irritable reaching’, absorbed by beauty enough to dispel his own subjectivity. Bishop suggests that in both experiencing and creating art ‘a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration’ is necessary, which can be seen as simultaneously Darwinian and Keatsian in that it seeks truth in nature’s palpability. The chapter concludes with a focus on how this method of concentration is manifested in Bishop’s poetry.

This introduction argues that New England regionalism included not only fiction writing but a range of women-dominated cultural practices including colonial home restoration, history writing, antique collecting, colonial fancy dressing, and photography. Using the example of Elizabeth Bishop Perkins, this introduction demonstrates the alternative intimate forms and temporalities central to New England regionalism's history-making project. It explicates how regionalist writers placed the unmarried daughter at the center of New England history, representing her as cosmopolitan, mobile, and queer. In foregrounding the unmarried daughter of New England as the ideal inheritor of a legacy of dissent, these regionalists theorized modes of white belonging based on women's myriad alternative desires rather than marriage and maternity.

This chapter examines Elizabeth Bishop's artistic passions that include wavering lines, appearance and disappearance, and kites. It considers Bishop's appreciation of visual art and her interest in painting, as shown by her admiration for the work of the painter Paul Klee. It also discusses Bishop's use of lines in her paintings and as a means of tracing other representational objects. Drawing on some of her poems ranging from ‘The Moose’ to ‘One Art’ and ‘Santarém’, the chapter argues that voice is part of the achievement of her poetry. It also explores Jacques Derrida's views about the line or trace and Bishop's allusions to nets in her writing.

This chapter demonstrates how the historical project of New England regionalism extended beyond the supposed end of that mode's popularity (c. 1915) and into the modernist era. It focuses on the writings of three women fiction writers left out of accounts of regionalism: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice Brown, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Each of these writers used New England-based colonial revivalism in her fiction to explore problems of race and queer desires in history. These writers consistently limned the contours of identity in time by portraying women characters as fusing with ghosts of the colonial and Revolutionary-era past. This chapter troubles traditional accounts of literary history by revealing the modernist sensibilities of New England regionalism and its very practice up through the so-called modernist moment.

This chapter begins with a brief sketch of Elizabeth Bishop's early childhood. It then describes her experiences at Camp Chequesset, where she returned every summer for five years, starting in 1924. In the summer of 1925, the camp held a poetry contest. Bishop's entry, printed that fall in the Camp Chequesset Log, is her first published poem. The chapter also provides excerpts of Bishop's letters to her friend Louise Bradley, whom she met in 1924 at South Station in Boston, where they were both waiting for the train to Chequesset. They remained loyal correspondents through Bishop's years at Vassar. The last letters were mailed in 1950, after the women had met briefly in New York while Bishop was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

This chapter examines Elizabeth Bishop's relationship with fellow poet Marianne Moore, whom she met in 1934 as a senior student about to graduate from Vassar College. Aside from drafts of poems and prose, Bishop often sent Moore gifts. In her memoir of Moore, ‘Efforts of Affection’, which she wrote after the latter's death in 1972, Bishop revealed that a nautilus shell was one of the most ‘successful’ gifts she had given to Moore. The nautilus shell, which became the subject of Bishop's poem ‘The Paper Nautilus’, is possibly the same nautilus shell that Bishop's lover and companion at the time, Louise Crane, presented to Moore in February 1937. Bishop compared Moore with Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of her own early influences for poetry. However, some aspects of Moore's poetics were less congenial to Bishop. For her part, Moore was both astute and generous as a reader of Bishop's poems.

It has become a commonplace to describe Elizabeth Bishop not in terms of what she said but what she should have said. The placid surface of her poems conceals a severe and variegated subaqueous terrain; her famous “reticence” suggests an unwillingness to be candid. “Poem” is a important source for understanding Bishop's ideas about art's relationship to personal experience. When Bishop speaks, in “Poem,” of “life and the memory of it so compressed / they've turned into each other,” she is identifying one solution to a problem that concerns her throughout her career, namely, the problem of narrative. The question of what counts as autobiography in Bishop cannot be answered without considering her late narrative poem “Crusoe in England.” Bishop offers a model for lyric poetry that differs from Robert Lowell's in choosing the “insignificant,” even interchangeable, facts of domestic life over those of history; the perceptual over the intellectual, the displaced over the disclosed, the prismatic over the linear. Her poems therefore document the development and career of a sensibility within an autobiographical frame.

This chapter explores the relationship between suspended spheres and interdisciplinary poetic reading, drawing on popular and pedagogical writing that invites reflection on patriotic fantasies' relations to post-Victorian processes of reading—and unreading—sentimental poetic texts. It first analyzes Virginia Woolf's “The Works of Mrs. Hemans,” which not only presents learning to unread sentimental poetry as an educational rite of passage, but encourages the cultivation of part comic, part courtly, part anxious visions of naïve and sentimental readers. It then considers Felicia Dorothea Hemans's “Casabianca” and compares it to Elizabeth Bishop's “Casabianca,” arguing that consent to the patriotic Poetess terrors of Hemans may well serve as prerequisite for rendering the terrifying critical and political as well as poetic achievement of Bishop's modernist elegy fully legible. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the New York Times' volume Portraits: 9/11/01; The Collected “Portraits of Grief”.

There was a time in her career when Elizabeth Bishop was wary of literary theory and literary criticism. Bishop was particularly dismissive of any attempt to read too much into her poems, even as she read widely in art criticism and was an astute critic herself. She employed face-to-face encounters and a child's point of view in her poetry, along with puns and half-rhymes. This book deals primarily with Bishop's poetry and her writing process, with emphasis on the complicated ‘lines’ that connect her poems and other writing. Drawing extensively on her letters and unpublished notebooks, it examines Bishop's richly textured words and voice, her literary and cultural context, and her connection with other important contemporary figures such as Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and Melanie Klein.