Bishop, Elizabeth | Anne Stevenson (essay date 1996)
Anne Stevenson (essay date 1996)
“The Iceberg and the Ship,” in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXV, No. 4, Fall, 1996, pp. 704-19.
[In the following essay, Stevenson discusses the development of Bishop's poetry, her major influences, and personal experiences that affected her work.]
Elizabeth Bishop's poetry is an acquired taste, but one that easily turns other poets into addicts. John Ashbery said of her once that she was a “writer's writer's writer”—a description that hardly explains the breadth of her appeal. In the early 1960s, when I first discovered “The Fish” in a college anthology, she was chiefly praised for the finely observed details she “painted” into her poems. Who else would liken a hooked fish to ancient rose-patterned wallpaper, or imagine its flesh “packed in like feathers” and its swim-bladder “like a big peony”?
No wonder that in England, during the 1970s, the so-called Martian poets...
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