Visits to St. Elizabeths (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Elizabeth Bishop
- First Published: 1950
- Type of Work: Poem
- Genres: Poetry, Meditation
- Subjects: Mental illness, Washington, D.C., Mental institutions, hospitals or asylums
“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...
[The entire page is 751 words long]
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