Bishop, Elizabeth | William Logan (essay date 1994)
William Logan (essay date 1994)
“The Unbearable Lightness of Elizabeth Bishop,” in Southwest Review, Vol. 79, No. 1, Winter, 1994, pp. 120-38.
[In the following essay, Logan discusses the ways in which Bishop's poetry has been misinterpreted and pigeonholed by critics.]
The beauty of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry lies in the keenness of its reserve, and the duplicity such reserve demands from the integral operations of language. Surely no poet in this century, other than Auden, has written so many likable poems or suffered more from the consoling attentions of critics. Her readers cannot be blamed for having mistaken her: it is the condition of a poet of limited means to be mistaken, and usually in her virtues rather than her vices.
Her vices were of course often taken for virtues. Bishop was once pigeonholed as a poet of visual scale, of specious ornamentation and frivolous detail. She was a Florida coastline stocked with rare...
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