[In the following essay, Travisano examines the sudden rise in the critical opinion of Bishop as one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.]

In a 1955 review of “The Year in Poetry” for Harper's, Randall Jarrell composed a notice of Elizabeth Bishop's latest book that would prove prophetic in more ways than one. He began:

Sometimes when I can't go to sleep at night I see the family of the future. Dressed in three-toned shorts-and-shirt sets of disposable Papersilk, they sit before the television wall of their apartment, only their eyes moving. After I've looked a while I always see—otherwise I'd die—a pigheaded soul over in the corner with a book; only his eyes are moving, but in them there is a different look.

Usually it's Homer he's holding—this week it's Elizabeth Bishop. Her Poems seems to me one of the best books an American poet has ever written: the people of the future (the ones in the corner) will read her just as they will read Dickinson or Whitman or Stevens, or the other classical American poets still alive among us.¹

Despite breathless predictions, Papersilk never really went anywhere, but the universal television wall has nearly made it, awaiting only the high-resolution digital TV signal to begin its inevitable march into the American home. However, Jarrell's most prophetic vision was to foresee that “pigheaded soul over in the corner” holding Elizabeth Bishop. Just as Jarrell anticipated, many of those pigheaded children of the television age who are still holding onto Homer or Dickinson or Whitman or Stevens have come to value, and with like intensity, that most understated and mysteriously inward of mid-century American poets, Elizabeth Bishop.

When Jarrell composed his review forty years ago, the prediction he made seemed bold indeed, for Elizabeth Bishop, though her poems were already valued for their brilliant surfaces, keen observation, and formal perfection, was then commonly placed on the fringes of literary history. Her reputation remained somewhere near the fringes thirty years ago, or twenty, or perhaps even ten. As late as 1977, John Ashbery, one of her keenest admirers, alluded to the select nature of her audience in his now-famous description of Bishop as a “writer's writer's writer.”² For while her work had been passionately admired by successive generations of poets, as well as by a small but impassioned circle of readers and critics, the scale of her reputation remained modest (a word also frequently used to describe Bishop as both a person and a writer), and the people writing the surveys and histories of modern and postmodern poetry still had trouble placing her, perhaps even seeing her. David Kalstone's 1977 essay in his book Five Temperaments, for many years the best single critical treatment of Bishop, suggested that “there was something about her work for which elegantly standard literary analysis was not prepared.” Hence Bishop remained, in a phrase of Kalstone's that surely exaggerates her position in 1977, “the most honored yet most elusive of poets.”³ Honored by her fellow poets but elusive to critics and historians Bishop certainly had proven to be. When Bishop died two years later in 1979, her profile within the academy perfectly mirrored the working definition of a “minor” poet: a single outdated critical book in the Twayne series,⁴ two or three unpublished dissertations, a handful of extended critical articles by academics (most of the commentary to date had taken the form of brief reviews or appreciations, the best of these mostly by poets), and a few dismissive footnotes by the literary historians. As recently as 1984, it was possible for a historical survey like James E. B. Breslin's From Modern to Contemporary to dismiss Bishop in a sentence or two. Breslin portrays Bishop as suffering the “apparent defeat” of “the middle generation of poets,” a poet who “worked steadily and independently, but the cost was isolation and critical neglect.”⁵ Breslin's vision of Bishop, of course, has proved less prophetic than Jarrell's, for in her case the defeat really was only “apparent.” Today, Bishop's career seems far from defeated, and her work is certainly not suffering from either isolation or critical neglect.

The dramatic reversal in Bishop's fortunes with readers and critics, achieved so quickly after her death in 1979, and, as Breslin's remarks make clear, still quietly gathering momentum in the mid-1980s and thus still invisible to many, is by no means the standard fate of a literary reputation. The poet John Malcolm Brinnin has noted that after the death of most poets their reputation descends for a time “into a trough of indifference.” “But,” Brinnin continues, “in the case of Elizabeth Bishop we have seen just the obverse of that phenomenon. From the moment of her death, it seems that her reputation has continually ascended.”⁶ The consequence, states Langdon Hammer in a recent review article entitled “The New Elizabeth Bishop” is that “We are witnessing that most interesting and mysterious of literary events: the making of a major poet, by something like consensus.”⁷ Bishop's influence on younger poets, dismissed by Breslin in 1984, is now pervasive, perhaps to the point of excess. Hammer, in fact, claims that “No poet has more widely or powerfully influenced current poetic practice than Bishop” (NE 137). And Bishop seems just as highly regarded within the academy, if one measures this regard in terms of the volume and intensity of critical study currently being directed at her work. As recently as 1988, in an introduction to only the second critical monograph ever published on Bishop, and the first in twenty-two years, I had occasion to say that “we are still in an early stage of Bishop studies.”⁸ Less than a decade later, the once tiny universe of Bishop studies has undergone the literary equivalent of a Big Bang: it is rapidly expanding in all directions, at what appears to be an ever-accelerating rate. Bishop's “steady” and “independent” work has won through, after all, to her present eminence in American letters. And the process of reconsidering—and restating—her position in literary history seems to have only begun.

Bishop's dramatic emergence, which might aptly be termed “The Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon,” is taking place at the very moment when the making and remaking of literary history, understood as a political as well as a critical and historical activity, provides the focus for intense theoretical and practical debate, with special attention to the processes by which canons are formed and reformed. The Bishop phenomenon, an event with a long history and a significant paper trail, offers a valuable case study in the process whereby a writer moves from the margins of literary history into the spotlight. One can learn a great deal about the present requirements and mechanisms of our literary culture by studying this phenomenon. But to embark on this study, it appears one must construct one's own model of the mechanisms that have combined to create it.

For example, despite his useful recognition of the evolutionary nature of the canon and literary history, the process of “repression and recovery” described in a recent book by Cary Nelson does not appear to answer Bishop's case.⁹ Bishop's image was never truly “repressed,” in Nelson's sense of being completely effaced from the record of American literary culture; it was merely miniaturized. Nor have literary historians played, in Bishop's case, the heroic role, outlined by Nelson, of “recovering” a body of work by reconstructing its lost cultural moment in contemporary terms. As I will detail in the course of this essay, the phenomenon has depended, instead, on the widespread recognition, across a range of constituencies, of the way Bishop's life and work responds to an extraordinary variety of contemporary perceptions and concerns. The Bishop phenomenon has taken place for the most part outside the history books, surging ahead of any attempt by literary historians to describe it, let alone to shape it. Historians must now struggle to catch up with the new cultural reality.

What has driven the Bishop phenomenon so vigorously? Bishop's emergence strongly indicates the significance of five principles, working together amidst a complex matrix of shifting pressures and influences, that have propelled her rise in literary status. The shift in a single one of these factors might not suffice to bring about a dramatic rise or fall in a writer's reputation. On the other hand, when several factors work together, as they have done in Bishop's case, they can combine to achieve powerful synergistic effects, repositioning the writer in a dramatic way.

Five principles have combined to set the Bishop phenomenon in motion. They are: (1) shifts in the cultural perspective of the readership; (2) shifts in the critical paradigm; (3) the emergence of new evidence about the author; (4) the clamor of influential advocates; and (5) assimilation of the intrinsic qualities of the work. Critics who attempt to account for Bishop's shift in status by attaching causality to only one or two of these principles run the risk of denying or ignoring principles at odds with their stated or implicit assumptions. Hammer, noncommittal on the fifth principle, insists on the significance of the first, which I call “a shift in the cultural perspective of the readership.” As he puts it: “The new view [of Bishop] is in fact unthinkable without feminism: the growing interest in Bishop's life and work participates in the general effort to recover and interpret women writers” (NE 138). On the other hand, J. D. McClatchy, a long-time Bishop observer and advocate, pointedly dismisses the significance of the first two principles, and in particular the influence of feminism, while insisting on the primacy of the fifth, which I call “assimilation of the intrinsic qualities of the work”: “Neither the tides of literary fashion nor the sort of feminist boosterism she herself deplored accounts for this phenomenon. It's simply that more and more readers have discovered the enduring power of her work—quicksilver poems lined with dark moral clouds.”¹⁰ Hammer and McClatchy contradict one another because neither seems prepared to acknowledge or explain the complexities of the process. Hammer does not explain, for example, why Bishop has been accorded a posthumous acclaim not enjoyed by other women poets far more vocally “feminist” than Bishop herself, while McClatchy does not explain how or why “more and more readers have discovered” Bishop's work, which had long remained the more or less private preserve of neoformalist poets such as himself.

The Bishop phenomenon can best be explained if one recognizes each of the factors cited so far by Hammer and McClatchy, along with other principles considered causal by neither. For in Bishop's case each of the five principles mentioned above was until recently working against her. At present, due to profound changes in commonly held cultural and critical perspectives, allied with profound changes in common perceptions of Bishop's life and work, all five of these factors have reversed themselves. All five are now working in Bishop's favor. Dramatic shifts in the values and norms of Bishop's potential readership, combined with significant changes in readers' perceptions of Bishop and her work, account for the otherwise “mysterious” force and suddenness of Bishop's recent emergence. Her work has built a consensus not by any mysterious process, but in the way a consensus commonly is built: representatives of differing points of view have recognized and united around a common interest, while in other respects holding on to their differences.

It is now time to take a closer look at the five principles as they have operated in Bishop's case, propelling her to her current status as a valuable cultural commodity. Let me add a cautionary note. I am not attempting to outline here the process as it ought to work. Rather, I am attempting to analyze how—in at least one extremely dramatic and suggestive case—the process of making a major poet actually does appear to work. Nor am I trying to speak for the continuing presence of distinctions like “major” and “minor.” As a long-standing advocate for Bishop, I remain acutely aware that Bishop's case placed her, at different times, at opposite ends of the literary spectrum. Her early experience suggests how often distinctions may be claimed on the basis of impulses that are arbitrary, capricious, poorly-informed or prejudicial. But the Bishop phenomenon nonetheless confirms that such distinctions still exist in the minds of literary people, male and female, and that these distinctions continue to influence perception and behavior.

I. A SHIFT IN THE CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE OF THE READERSHIP

Shifts in cultural perspective, of course, very frequently precede the rediscovery of a neglected writer or the projection of a neglected work into literary prominence. One obvious case in point is Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Chopin's brief, poignant novel was widely praised for its artistry by reviewers upon its publication in 1899, but it was nonetheless largely rejected by them—on moral grounds. The views of a commentator for the Chicago Times-Herald were echoed widely: “That the book is strong and that Miss Chopin has a keen knowledge of certain phases of feminine character will not be denied. But it was not necessary for a writer of so great refinement and poetic grace to enter the overworked field of sex fiction.”¹¹The Awakening soon passed into the oblivion of an “unread book,” but it has since been recovered and elevated to a secure place in the canon: in large part, of course, though by no means exclusively, as the consequence of a dramatic shift in the cultural perspective of its readership.

Twenty years back, Bishop's work just didn't give off the aura that most readers expected of a great poet. Her friend and fellow poet James Merrill has spoken of Bishop's “instinctive, modest, life-long impersonations of an ordinary woman.”¹² But while this impersonation protected Bishop from various forms of scrutiny—her lesbian sexuality, her lonely and often painful emotional life, her struggles with alcoholism and asthma, and the intensity and scope of her artistic ambitions were all aspects of herself that she chose to keep private—in some respects the act succeeded almost too well. The fact that her tone was that of a quiet-spoken woman rather than that of a prophetic male, or—failing that—a prophetic female defining her independence against the domination of males, left earlier critics, both male and female, grasping for a handle. And Bishop's work further embodied an almost complete refusal to generalize and an absence of obvious literary, historical, or political reference points, offering few handles, likewise, to either critic or historian. Hence, while Bishop received few really negative reviews over a career spanning four decades, she received many in which praise was undercut by condescension. Male critics might compare Bishop's voice, in so many words, to that of “a much prized, plain-spoken, pleasantly idiosyncratic maiden aunt,” as one did in a 1969 review significantly titled “Minor Poet with a Major Fund of Love,” a title the reviewer apparently intended as a compliment.¹³ At the same time, early feminists were troubled by the quietness and apparent impersonality of Bishop's tone and by her refusal to appear in female-only anthologies. Alicia Ostriker, for example, in the influential 1986 feminist history of women's poetry Stealing the Language, types Bishop as an “apolitical poet” and reads a poem like “Roosters” as “a capsule representation of the restraints inhibiting poets who would be ladies.”¹⁴ As Betsy Erkkila has observed, “feminist critics tended to dismiss Bishop's work in favor of more explicitly personal and confessional women poets.”¹⁵ Bishop explained in a 1979 letter that when she was described as looking “‘like anybody's grandmother’” or “‘like somebody's great aunt’” her anger “has brought my feminist facet uppermost.”¹⁶ But despite this privately observed resentment, which provided the subtext for many poems and stories by a poet who described herself in a Paris Review interview as a “strong feminist,”¹⁷ Bishop's ultimate acceptance by feminist readers, themselves growing gradually more influential as they slowly worked their way into positions of cultural authority, was far from automatic. Hence, when Hammer asserts that the new Bishop is “unthinkable without feminism,” his analysis glides a little too smoothly over a roadblock that the Bishop legacy had, in fact, to confront: before feminism could contribute its momentum to the Bishop phenomenon, feminism had first to recognize and claim Elizabeth Bishop.

Marilyn May Lombardi alludes to this rapidly evolving historical process in her “Prologue” to the recently published Elizabeth Bishop: Geography of Gender, the first collection of essays to explore Bishop's work from a feminist perspective: “The reasons for Bishop's belated and somewhat uneasy assimilation into the feminist critical canon are multiple and germane to any discussion of feminism's role in mapping such a tradition. Bishop's poetry emerges from this reconsideration as more amendable to feminist interpretation than previously imagined. At the same time, her art expands our narrow definitions of the ‘woman poet’ or ‘woman's poetry’ and so poses a greater challenge to feminist orthodoxies than earlier readers may have been willing to admit” (GG 5). Lombardi notes that a landmark in this reclamation process came with Adrienne Rich's 1983 review of Bishop's Complete Poems, 1927-1979, which predates every essay in Lombardi's collection and is arguably the first successful feminist reading of Bishop's life and work. Rich asserts in that review, “In particular I am concerned with her experience of outsiderhood, closely—though not exclusively—linked with the essential outsiderhood of a lesbian identity; and with how the outsider's eye enables Bishop to perceive other kinds of outsiders to identify, or try to identify, with them.”¹⁸ As the '80s have moved into the '90s, critics have become ever more practiced and adept at reading the many texts by women that meet Rich's criteria, understated texts observed “with an outsider's eye” and encoded with the perceptions, identifications, and quiet protests of outsiderhood. Rich is particularly acute in directing attention toward Bishop's subtle rendering of acts of attempted identification, attempts that often remain imperfect and incomplete in Bishop's poems but, that, in the process, achieve subtle miracles of authenticity, surprise, and humor. Rich was perhaps the first to read Bishop as a poet “who was critically and consciously trying to explore marginality, power and powerlessness, often in poetry of great beauty” (17).

Recent feminist readings of Bishop have generally taken Rich's review as a point of departure, then branched out in all directions, defining the significance of Bishop's legacy variously across a spectrum of opinion that represents the diversity of present-day feminism. Lombardi herself reads Bishop's refusal to appear in female-only anthologies as a valid act because it was “consistent with her lifelong aversion to systems of polarization, exclusion, and subordination” (GG 6). And Joanne Feit Diehl argues in an essay reprinted in the Lombardi collection that “Bishop's poems reveal the complex tensions between women poets and the Romantic tradition she identified as her own.”¹⁹ Diehl reads Bishop as extending the romantic tradition by subverting patriarchal habits of perception. “With an Emersonian audacity tempered by a tact requisite to her radical vision, Bishop's poems aim at nothing short of freedom from the inherently dualistic tradition that lies not only at the foundations of the American Sublime but at the very heart of the Western Literary tradition” (GG 34). For Diehl, then, Bishop's “sexual poetics carries us … to an experimental sublime that assumes a form freed of the ascriptions of gender” (GG 42).

Lorrie Goldensohn reads Bishop less in terms of external nature than in terms of the female body, locating in the body an eroticized, yet erotically and emotionally troubled, Bishop who is not so much “freed of the ascriptions of gender” as determined by gender, a figure struggling with internalized longings and constraints linked to or imposed by both her sex and the marks of early childhood losses. Reflecting on “those awful hanging breasts” in “In the Waiting Room,” Goldensohn comments, “the fascination with the female seems as closely linked to the theme of the abandoning mother as it does to the seductive, eroticized female body, whether powerless or not. We could as easily associate the fear of breasts with a suppressed longing for them and for the monstrous and disturbing power to evoke longing that they retain; negatively colored feeling could be said to stem from early deprivation.”²⁰ Jeredith Merrin, by contrast, though she acknowledges “the recurrent psychological and philosophical dilemmas in her work,” chooses to emphasize “the playful rather than the troubled Bishop, because it provides a way to address the pleasure and quiet excitement of reading a poem by her.”²¹ Hence, for Merrin, “the pleasurable qualities or the gaiety of her poetry … may be seen as related to her sexuality, her lesbianism or gayness” (GG 163).

A 1994 review of the Lombardi collection by Adrian Oktenberg for the Women's Review of Books goes further in its demand for a more radically feminist reading of Bishop. Oktenberg dismisses Diehl for reading Bishop “against a background mostly of men,” critiques Goldensohn for remaining “mired in whiteness, in bafflement and fear,” and Merrin for failing to read Bishop in terms of Rich's “pointedly political tradition of outsiderhood to heterosexual culture.”²² Oktenberg cites instead the collection's title essay by Lee Edelman to validate reading Bishop as “a deeply subversive writer, one who challenged imperatives of gender and sexuality, who ‘wages war against the reduction of women to the status of literal figure,’ who ‘makes a war cry to unleash the textuality that rips the fabric of the cultural text.’” And, summarizing Jacqueline Vaught Brogan's essay, “Elizabeth Bishop: Perversity as Voice,” the review urges further that we consider Bishop as “a conscious resister of things as they are, and as a conscious maker of oppositional texts” (LS 29).

Despite their differences, each of the readings cited so far agrees that Bishop should be read as an “outsider,” a writer whose viewpoint was fixed by her gender and her lesbian sexuality. But if one looks at Bishop's life from an alternate perspective, it is clear that she also enjoyed many privileges of an “insider.” She attended fine schools; she was supported for most of her life by a modest inheritance; she shared a beautiful house and estate in Brazil with Lota de Macedo Soares, a member of the intellectual and cultural elite; she won prestigious fellowships and awards; and she closed her career by teaching at Harvard. Indeed, Charles Tomlinson once dismissed Bishop's portraits of the disadvantaged with the remark, “The better-off have always preferred their poor processed by style.”²³ Victoria Harrison, in her 1993 study Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy, responds by reading Bishop as a contemporary pragmatist whose work reflects a “double point of view.” “Bishop's poetry,” asserts Harrison, “particularly her late poetry, defies such distinctions of inside and outside; or rather, it enacts a slippage, locating the ‘significant, illustrative, American, etc.’ precisely in the voices of the traditionally marginalized—children, tourists, an island recluse, a stray dog, the clutter of a poet's desk.”²⁴ Returning to the Lombardi collection, one finds Barbara Page reading Bishop in a way that overlaps Harrison, while emphasizing Bishop's potential links with a postmodern indeterminacy: “Against the finality of closure, Bishop asserted her preference for unofficial and unstable positionings.” Borrowing a phrase from Bishop's Key West notebooks, Page concludes: “By the time she moved on from Key West, she had herself become a poet of ‘interstitial situations,’ truant from the rules governing the lives of women, in but not altogether of the club of male poets, the artist of oblique realities.”²⁵

The spectrum of opinion represented here reveals, perhaps, as much about the range of currently available feminist readings as it does about the poet being read. The range of overlapping but significantly differing perspectives that are already forming around Bishop displays her emerging role as a leading representative of a feminist poetics. When readers look into Bishop's incisively faceted work, they seem to find themselves mirrored there. The very absence of determining normative statements in her poems, combined with the highly charged, emblematic images that so strongly suggest meaning, apparently encourages this extraordinary spectrum of reading. In any case, her readers seem to agree that the considerable latent emotional and intellectual power of her work grows in significant part out of Bishop's subtle but trenchant exploitation of her viewpoint as a woman. That Bishop can be and has been incorporated within the feminist canon is no longer in doubt—a startling fact, given Ostriker's vigorous dismissal as recently as 1986. Nor does any doubt remain that a diversity of feminist readings of Bishop's work can be sustained. That contenting branches of feminism show an emergent determination to read Bishop according to their own lights underscores the power and suggestiveness of the texts she left behind, even as it confirms Bishop's present importance as a cultural commodity.

Of course, renewed attention to the perspective of the outsider is not the sole domain of gender studies. This new attention has emerged as one phase of a larger cultural critique that is also reexamining the conditioning assumptions of imperialism, capitalism, social class, race, and ethnicity. Contemporary literary culture's recent attention to and appreciation of cultural variety and difference casts many of Bishop's poems in a new light. Rich's reading of Bishop as “outsider,” Edelman's reading of a poet who “rips the fabric of the cultural text,” Brogan's and Oktenberg's reading of Bishop as “conscious resister,” Harrison's reading of a “double point of view,” and Page's reading of her “unofficial and unstable positions,” might each function in the context of a broader examination of Bishop as a poet of history, culture, and politics. Bishop's travel writings were once widely dismissed as trivial: in part because of where she chose to travel, in part because of why she chose to go there. Tomlinson complained that Bishop “travels because she likes it, not because she is homeless as Lawrence or Schoenberg were” (EB 89). Two years after Bishop's death in 1979, a Pulitzer Prize-winning literary biographer asked me, in apparent bewilderment, what had motivated Bishop to spend all those years living in and writing from Brazil. If Bishop had chosen to reside in and write about Paris, London, or Rome, the question might not have arisen or might have been couched in a different tone. An “expatriate” departing from or moving toward a European capital then garnered a respect of which a “tourist” seemed unworthy—to use the word reviewers commonly applied to Bishop-as-traveler. That Bishop had been living all those years in Brazil with her friend and lover Lota de Macedo Soares was a biographical fact still more or less unavailable, in 1981, to all but the most closely informed of the literati.

In any case, Bishop's long sojourns along subtropical coastlines and in the villages of North American backwaters, her residencies in Florida, Key West, Mexico, Maine, Morocco, Nova Scotia, and Brazil, once seemed to place her on the geographical and cultural margins. Readers newly drawn to Bishop's work might well be impressed by the authenticity of her interest.²⁶ Fifty, forty, or thirty years ago, when Bishop was writing all of those poems and stories and long letters studying and appreciating the individuality and integrity of indigenous peoples—or examining the “history” (to use her word) embodied in postcolonial artifacts—in ways that dramatize and hold up for contemplation the gaps between Western and non-Western modes of conditioning, perception, and social behavior, she was simply following her own proclivities in a way that placed her characteristically ahead of the curve.²⁷ Bishop is being revalued, then, because she can be read as a poet whose apparently small-scale poems open outward into explorations of large and complex problems, including the problems of gender, love, sexuality, nature, poverty, and culture outlined above, as well as a related set of problems that I am about to touch upon: experiences of grief and loss, and of moral, emotional, and perceptual uncertainty and insecurity.

II. A SHIFT IN THE CRITICAL PARADIGM

The emergence in the 1920s and 1930s of a critical paradigm that valued and knew how to explicate the ambiguity, irony, and narrative disjunctions of modernism led directly to the revaluation of a good deal of earlier writing, including metaphysical poetry, Jacobean tragedy, Dickinson's poetry, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and Melville's Moby Dick, that had previously been dismissed as contrived, confused, or obscure. It also led to the apparently permanent exile of Longfellow and Whittier from the major canon of American poetry and to the far more partial and temporary demotion of Milton from the English canon. Shakespeare, throughout the latter half of the seventeenth century considered by most readers—Dryden and Milton were the exceptions—as the rough-hewn inferior of that polished and learned courtier Ben Jonson, was elevated to his current place as England's chief cultural icon in the mid-eighteenth century, due in large part to shifts in cultural perspective and to a new critical paradigm that revalued nature and sensibility and encouraged greater formal freedom in the arts. Critical paradigms come and go, and as they do, the reputations of selected writers rise and fall.

From the 1960s through at least the 1970s, a prevailing critical paradigm for recent verse was the model of confessional poetry. M. L. Rosenthal explained in 1967 that: “The term ‘confessional poetry’ came naturally to my mind when I reviewed Robert Lowell's Life Studies in 1959, and perhaps it came to the minds of others just as naturally. Whoever invented it, it was a term both helpful and too limited, and very possibly the conception of a confessional school has by now done a certain amount of damage.”²⁸ Indeed, this invention of the critics was far from universally popular with the poets. When an interviewer asked John Berryman, a longtime admirer of Bishop's work, and himself the recipient of a verse tribute from Bishop, how he reacted to the label “confessional poet,” he replied: “With rage and contempt! Next Question!”²⁹ Berryman rejected the confessional label and insisted that the Henry of the Dream Songs is “essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me),” because, while there are clearly parallels between himself and Henry, he could not accept reductive readings of the relation between an author and that author's fictive things. Still, Rosenthal felt that, “because of the way Lowell brought his private humiliations, sufferings, and psychological problems into the poems of Life Studies, the word ‘confessional’ seemed appropriate enough.”³⁰ Rosenthal's model was particularly influential with academic critics and literary historians, including, as we have seen, some early feminists like Ostriker, since it offered a humanly compelling and rather clear-cut way of evaluating poetry. Poems involving daring self-revelation could be assumed to be bold and sincere. Bishop's own poetry, widely viewed as “reticent,” failed to conform to this reigning critical paradigm and was thus often dismissed as artificial and too polite. Women poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, both former disciplines of Lowell, seemed to mark out a bolder style, as did the poetics of feminist protest forged by Adrienne Rich and others, and the poetics of political protest that then centered on the war in Vietnam. Bishop's understated poetry (which never explicitly mentioned Vietnam) seemed peculiarly remote in the face of these demands for relevance. In The Modern Poets (1960), Rosenthal paired Bishop with Richard Wilbur, asserting that while these poets have “done exquisite and richly suggestive work” they have “touched the imagination of their generation very little. The reason seems to be that they remind us only of what we have already been taught to value: elegance, grace, precision, quiet intensity of phrasing.”³¹

Significantly, the putative inventor of confessional poetry, Robert Lowell, did not share Rosenthal's view of Bishop's work. Lowell's own frequent public acknowledgment that his style, especially in Life Studies, derived to a significant degree from Bishop's example was generally ignored by contemporary critics and historians, as was Bishop's declaration of the grounds of her own affinity with Lowell in a blurb on the jacket of Life Studies itself.³² She found his poems “as big as life, … alive, and rainbow-edged,” and she read the poems, perceptively, I think, for their underlying strokes of Jamesian art, appreciating their subtlety and gentleness, their social insight, their graces of refinement and structure, in concert with their more visceral effects: “In these poems, heart-breaking, shocking, grotesque and gentle, the unhesitant attack, the imagery and construction, are as brilliant as ever, but the mood is nostalgic and the meter is refined. A poem like ‘My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,’ or ‘Skunk Hour,’ can tell us as much about the state of society as a volume of Henry James at his best.”³³ Readers in the 1960s and early 1970s may have had trouble making a connection that seemed natural enough to Bishop and Lowell themselves because they failed to recognize both Lowell's own subtle manipulation of his artistic materials and the subtle yet profound unease at the heart of Bishop's poems. Bishop's published work might disguise the pressures that produced it, but her life was full of “private humiliations, sufferings, and psychological problems,” and in her work the personal intensity simmers just below the surface. Bishop's work might appear not to conform to the reigning critical paradigm, but in the long run she would both encompass and subvert it.

Today, of course, confessional poetry no longer seems new and the urgencies and meat-cleaver clarities of '60s political poetry and early feminist poetry can seem embarrassing. References to contemporary events that once seemed so urgent now require scholarly footnotes. Indeed, many poems of the sixties may soon be candidates for the recovery process described by Cary Nelson. On the other hand, the very absence of personal and contemporary reference in Bishop's writing, which worked against her at one time, now works in her favor. Bishop's poetry, with its “enormous power of reticence”³⁴ noted by Octavio Paz, offers an antidote to the confessional school, while in another sense her work quietly continues and reinforces many of the more artistically compelling features and traditions of an autobiographically grounded aesthetic. Berryman's Dream Songs, for example, confesses only to incidental and symptomatic experiences of suffering and humiliation. Berryman's crucial relationship with his father, who took his own life when Berryman was a boy of twelve, is merely hinted at in a few Songs, poems more conspicuous for elisions and emotional blockage than for revelations. And Berryman barely mentions his still more haunted and troubled relationship with his mother, a still-living woman whom he hated, feared, and loved. The most compelling emotional issues of the Dream Songs, then, are not confessed and exist only as subtext. Bishop admitted to Lowell in 1962 that she found Berryman difficult, but she continued, “One has the feeling 100 years from now he may be all the rage—or a ‘discovery’—hasn't one?”³⁵ Bishop's estimate is beginning to look plausible, for at this writing Berryman has been read far less successfully than has Bishop herself.

Bishop has emerged as perhaps the key figure in a contemporary neoformalist canon that continues to look back to poets such as Berryman and Lowell while forging a language of its own. Quiet inwardness, controlled self-exploration and self-revelation, conversational poise in a context of emotional impediment, verbal invention within visible reach of the formal conventions, and an environment of brooding moral uncertainty are some of the qualities valued by neoformalist poets and celebrated in surveys by poet-critics like Robert Pinsky, J. D. McClatchy, and Dana Gioia: surveys which look to Elizabeth Bishop as, in Gioia's words, “a crucial figure in our development as poets.”³⁶ McClatchy appreciates “the way her line and her tone transfigured each of the forms she worked in—none more so, as Merrill notes, than the villanelle,” and he goes on to confess that: “I remain fascinated by those few poems—uncharacteristic, one might say, except that they are as central to an understanding of her work as anything else—that are private (or seem so), that defy decoding, are mysterious in their references and effect.”³⁷

James McCorkle's survey The Still Performance, on the other hand, places Bishop in a line of postmodern poets including John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, and Charles Wright. Referring back to Edelman, McCorkle delineates a postmodern reading of Bishop as an explorer of “the provisionality of interconnectedness” in poems that represent “ambiguity, the play of observations and probing, and ekphrasis, rather than the authority of the observed and the observer's place,” qualities she shares, according to McCorkle with “seventeenth century Dutch painters.”³⁸ As one can see, Bishop's legacy is being claimed simultaneously by representatives of both a neoformalist and a postmodern canon, along lines that recall the contention of rival feminists. Ashbery, a poet who himself has been claimed by both the neoformalists and the postmodernists, comments that, “It shouldn't be a criticism leveled at Miss Bishop that her mind is capable of inspiring and delighting minds of so many different formations.”³⁹ And Ashbery offers a possible resolution of the contention over how to read Bishop when he notes the way her work projects the “strange divided singleness of our experience.”⁴⁰ Could it be that both the neoformalist and the postmodern readings are valid? For Ashbery, in any case, “It is this continually renewed sense of discovering the strangeness, the unreality of our reality at the very moment of becoming conscious of it as reality, that is the great subject of Elizabeth Bishop.”⁴¹

III. THE EMERGENCE OF NEW EVIDENCE

Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Franz Kafka offer examples of the possible effect that a new body of evidence can have on that author's reputation. In each of these cases, of course, the posthumous publication of an entire body of work in manuscript transformed a brilliant but obscure figure who had insisted upon lifelong anonymity into an author of world-class renown. Bishop had significant affinities for each of these writers and courted a lesser degree of anonymity in her own life. She was not rescued from real obscurity by her late and posthumous work, by any means, but the new evidence contained in an ongoing series of posthumous publications, and in a recent series of critical and biographical studies, has made a decisive contribution to the Bishop phenomenon. The figure she cuts in the literary world has been more or less completely transformed.

Bishop published relatively little during her lifetime; her four books were slim, and they appeared a decade apart. Some of the strongest evidence for Bishop's importance and scope emerged late in her career, with the publication of her last, most personal, and most arresting book, Geography III in 1976. The impact of this published legacy may be measured in a remark of Denis Donoghue. He used the expanding Bishop canon to explain why he was adding a chapter on Bishop in 1984 to a new edition of Connoisseurs of Chaos, a survey of modern poetry based on his Elliston Lectures at the University of Cincinnati in 1965. Donoghue explains, “When I was writing the book, only North & South (1946) and A Cold Spring (1955) were published: there was no sign of Questions of Travel (1965). Geography III was many years to come. The achievement of North & South was remarkable, but it was impossible to predict how the complete work would appear, and the scale of the last two books.”⁴²

For a long time, little was publicly known of Bishop's life, and the intensely introspective quality of her poetry, its elusive depth, was easily overlooked. It took some years for this condition to alter, even after Bishop's death. Indeed, when Ian Hamilton needed to refer to Bishop's homosexuality in his 1982 biography of Lowell, a fact that he had to establish because it naturally impinged on Lowell's recurring impulse to propose marriage to Bishop, he was forced to cite an interview, recorded in that same year, with a “friend who wishes to remain anonymous.” This unnamed friend explained: “I mustn't be the source of this, but I'm sure Elizabeth Bishop told me these things because she wanted them to be on the record to some extent.”⁴³ It would have been difficult to inaugurate a reading of Bishop's work in terms of the “essential outsiderhood of a lesbian identity” earlier than Rich did in 1983 because of the tacit ban on public discussion of her sexuality that Bishop imposed during her own lifetime, a ban still respected by her friends in the years just after her death in 1979. This friendly conspiracy of silence was only beginning to relax, as one can see, in 1982.

The introspective nature of Bishop's work could thus be overlooked even by acute critics. Alan Williamson justified the exclusion of Bishop from his 1984 book Introspection and Contemporary Poetry with the remark: “This turning inward has, of course, not been universal; good poets (Bishop and Wilbur, to name two) have ignored or resisted it.”⁴⁴ It is hard to imagine anyone offering a similar judgment today. Indeed Williamson appears to retract it in an essay on Bishop subtitled “The Poet of Feeling”: “It is increasingly evident that the force of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry is not altogether accounted for by that image of her so often put forward, in praise or blame: the heiress-apparent of Marianne Moore; the crowning glory of a canon of taste that emphasized surface exactitude, the elimination of the personal, and an arch, slightly inhibiting, self-consciousness about how the imagination works.”⁴⁵

Bishop, who published so little during the course of her life, has remained a publishing phenomenon after her death. A steady flow of major collections has been issued under the supervision of her loyal publisher, Robert Giroux, including The Complete Poems in 1983, which contained a number of important, previously uncollected lyrics and The Collected Prose in 1984, which published for the first time a revealing cluster of autobiographical stories and memoirs, and collected others that had been buried in the back issues of literary journals for decades and had been known previously only to a handful of Bishop scholars.

Giroux also saw to the completion and publication of David Kalstone's Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, a critical work, left unfinished at the author's death and arranged for the press at Giroux's request by Robert Hemenway. Kalstone's groundbreaking study appeared in 1989, enriching the reading public's critical, biographical, and historical understanding of Bishop while indirectly extending the published Bishop canon through many extracts from Bishop's workbooks and a detailed and nuanced reading of Bishop's extensive correspondence with two key correspondents: Moore and Lowell. Kalstone's book made it impossible to dismiss Bishop as an isolated or marginal figure by showing how deep, intimate, and complex was her relationship with two of the leading poets of the century.

One Art: Letters, selected and edited by Giroux, constitutes yet another significant expansion of the Bishop canon. It further documents Bishop's extended relations with important writers and cultural figures while taking us deeper into Bishop's complex emotional world. Moreover, it makes available, at a stroke, more than six hundred pages of frequently wonderful writing. Adrian Oktenberg comments wryly on Giroux's “deliberate presentation of Bishop as A Great Poet (which she was, to be sure); one can almost see Bishop being elevated in the canon by it” (LS 28). In the Times Literary Supplement Tom Paulin lets out all the stops, proclaiming: “The publication of Elizabeth Bishop's Selected Letters is a historic event, a bit like discovering a new planet or watching a bustling continent emerge, glossy and triumphant, from a blank ocean. Here is an immense cultural treasure being suddenly unveiled—and this hefty selection is only the beginning. Before the millennium is out, Bishop will be seen as one of this century's epistolary geniuses, like that modernist Victorian Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom she lovingly admired and learnt from.”⁴⁶ Significantly, despite the length of the selection, many reviewers lamented specific omissions of important letters (I have noted dozens myself), omissions which were perhaps inevitable in a book selecting 541 letters from the more than three thousand available. And the reviewers have generally concurred with Giroux's own comment that Bishop “deserves a multivolume edition of all her letters.”⁴⁷ “If,” writes Paulin, “that work is still waiting to be commissioned, let it begin soon. Let it start tomorrow” (NN 5).

Moreover, many more of Bishop's writings have come to light outside the official Farrar Straus editions. These newly available writings, in some cases published in journals, in some cases cited in critical works, include a diverse range of juvenile prose and verse, erotic, “confessional,” and political poems, stories, essays, letters, and other writings. Besides bringing a lot of good writing into print and confirming Bishop's excellence in previously undocumented genres, these publications have provided new and revealing evidence that has enriched and complicated our image of Bishop as a writer and a person. Lorrie Goldensohn based a distinguished book on a previously unpublished poem of lesbian eroticism that she uncovered in Brazil. The biographical revelations in Kalstone's Becoming a Poet, combining with recent biographies by Brett Millier and Gary Fountain, have added nuance and contour to the Bishop profile. Recent monographs by Bonnie Costello, Victoria Harrison, Joanne Feit Diehl, and Marilyn May Lombardi have continued an exploration-in-depth of the letters and unpublished poems and stories to be found in the manuscript archive at the Vassar College Library, in the process further mapping Bishop's interior world.⁴⁸ The fussy early image of the ladylike poetess has simply been exploded by all this new material, and Bishop emerges as a far more complex and compelling figure than she once seemed.

Bishop herself had a repressive effect on Bishop studies during her lifetime, limiting access to whatever letters were already in libraries and disapproving of all but the most conservative readings of her work. More than one Bishop critic and editor has confessed to fearing the poet's posthumous wrath. On the other hand, Bishop went to great lengths to preserve her manuscript legacy, spending weeks on the packing and shipping of her materials from Brazil after Lota's death, at a time when it was no longer pleasant or comfortable to live there. Perhaps events have turned out more or less as Bishop wanted them to. Her privacy was preserved while she lived, and her fascinating inner world revealed after her death. The three-dimensional figure of Bishop visible to today's readers and critics—a figure who is vulnerable, fallible, bohemian, lonely, alcoholic, tenacious, ambitious, libidinous, and humorous—may not be, as yet, the “real” or “complete” Elizabeth Bishop, but it is a far more human, extensive, detailed, complex, and downright interesting persona than that two-dimensional figure of the acolyte-of-pure-art-posing-as-ordinary-woman that Bishop and her friends conspired to present before her death. At last, the reading public has an image capable of sustaining the impression of a major writer.

As we have seen, the Bishop canon is still expanding, at a rate that often seems to exceed her rate of production while she lived. And plenty of material remains in manuscript, enough to keep scholars busy for a long time, enough, indeed, to sustain a high-profile Elizabeth Bishop industry. An author who leaves behind a complex and extensive body of work that promises to keep generations of scholars in business has, of course, found one way to help insure a place in the canon and in literary history. Paulin insists, “There is an urgent need for a complete edition of the prose writings which includes her reviews and the work she published while an undergraduate at Vassar (the reissue of her Collected Prose is welcome, but it is not sufficient). A book which reproduces her paintings and discusses her very considerable knowledge of the visual arts would also be welcome” (NN 5). Let me add an interim request for the complete correspondence of Bishop and Moore, and the complete correspondence of Bishop and Lowell. We also obviously need a far more complete Complete Poems than the two previously offered. The emergence of all of this new evidence, and the promise of more, has clearly played a crucial role in the Bishop phenomenon.

IV. THE CLAMOR OF INFLUENTIAL ADVOCATES

It was partly through the advocacy of Johannes Brahms that an obscure Bohemian musician named Antonin Dvorak came into world-wide recognition. The advocacy of performing musicians has also had a measurable impact on the history of the art. In the 1920s and 1930s, the German pianist Arthur Schnabel brought the poignantly introspective sonatas of Schubert, neglected for a century, to the attention of the musical public. At the same time, the Polish harpsichordist Wanda Landowska was bringing fresh attention to a forgotten instrument and to the enormous and neglected canon of baroque keyboard music that could be played on it. In the 1950s, Greek-American soprano Maria Callas revived forgotten bel canto operas by Bellini, Rossini, and Donizetti. Gertrude Stein's advocacy was crucial to the emergence of Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, and other modernist painters, particularly in the English-speaking world, while Ezra Pound's advocacy was crucial to the emergence of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and other Anglo-American literary modernists. Advocacy by a new generation of feminist critics helped to bring The Awakening, mentioned earlier, to the renewed attention of the literary world. And feminist musicologists have helped to recover the compositions of Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Amy Beach, Lili Boulanger, and other neglected female composers. The importance of advocacy by fellow artists and by contemporary critical arbiters must not be overlooked when we assess the rise or fall of a writer's reputation. These advocates are by no means all powerful, particularly in a negative role—Eduard Hanslick, the most influential music critic in the German-speaking world, could not block Wagner's ascendancy in the field of music drama—but they can play a vital role in the emergence of neglected or forgotten work, work that often serves as a vehicle for the artist's or critic's own personal and cultural agenda.

Bishop, from the start, had what might seem an enviable array of advocates. How could one improve on Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan, Robert Lowell, and Randall Jarrell, or, later, James Merrill and John Ashbery? But advocates like these had not been able to assure Bishop's place in literary history during her lifetime, nor at the moment of her death. Why should this be so? In part, because until very late in her life Bishop had very few advocates within the academy, the arena wherein canons have been formed and reformed in the second half of the twentieth century and the arena wherein literary history itself is generally written. Bishop's early advocates were fellow poets who stressed both her modesty and the superb nature of her artistry. As I have already suggested, however, the image of a modest artist is demonstrably insufficient to project a writer beyond the level of a minor figure. A writer must also stand for something, and Bishop's early advocates had difficulty expressing what she stood for, beyond the refinements and discipline of Art itself. Marianne Moore's review of Bishop's first book labeled her a “Modest Expert,” and the first essay collection devoted to Bishop was titled Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. This 1983 volume includes, among its many brief appreciations, pieces on Bishop by all of the poets mentioned above, and others by the likes of Richard Wilbur, Richard Howard, William Meredith, Mark Strand, John Hollander, Lloyd Schwartz, Frank Bidart, and Robert Pinsky: a virtual catalog of leading neoformalist poets of two generations—and, for that matter, a group conspicuously dominated by males. These advocates and others of similar stamp helped Bishop to win the prizes and fellowships Kalstone alluded to in 1977, since poets often have a majority vote on award committees. But Bishop still seemed, in Kalstone's phrase, “hard to place.”⁴⁹ Senior professors were not producing the books or articles that would have given Bishop's work an aura of academic legitimacy, let alone urgency, nor were these scholars directing doctoral theses on Bishop in any quantity. Research was further blocked by the absence of scholarly reference tools or manuscript materials, so copious today. The conditions essential to the academic field of Bishop studies had yet to come into being.

However, at about the time Kalstone was publishing his observations, Bishop was beginning to pick up advocates who represented significant constituencies within the academy. For example, in 1977 Helen Vendler contributed a strong essay to a special Bishop issue of World Literature Today, the first special issue in any journal devoted to Bishop's work. The other essays and appreciations were notably the work of poets or of quite junior scholars. Combining with Kalstone's own essay on Bishop in Five Temperaments, Vendler's piece lent a seal of approval to Bishop in the arena of academic formalism. Also in 1977, Harold Bloom wrote a pointed review of Geography III for the New Republic, placing Bishop in a tradition of American nature poetry stretching back to Emerson and Whitman and extending through Stevens and Crane. Adrienne Rich's 1983 review of the Complete Poems may not have been the work of an academic, but it proved similarly influential within the academy, empowering a new generation of feminist critics.

Perhaps most important of all to Bishop's growing profile within the academy was the fact that, in her mid-fifties, Bishop had returned to America and was teaching for the first time in her life, at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she temporarily replaced the late Theodore Roethke, and then more permanently at Harvard, where she replaced the departing Robert Lowell. Bishop had always avoided the New York literary scene, had never published reviews, had avoided teaching, and these omissions and avoidances had hurt her recognition not a little. In Boston, more or less against her will, Bishop began to establish for the first time in her career a professional presence in a major cultural and academic center. She made friends with contemporaries like Octavio Paz and with younger poets like Sandra McPherson and Frank Bidart. Moreover, although she was a somewhat reluctant and uncomfortable teacher, she began to educate a core of disciples who emerged with a strong loyalty to her as a person and an artist. These disciples, some of them publishing poets equipped with Ph.D.'s and thus able to enter literature as well as writing programs, have since fanned out into the academy. There they have written about and edited Bishop's work. And, as teachers, they have helped bring that work to the attention of a rising generation of M.F.A. and Ph.D. candidates.⁵⁰

At last, then, starting tentatively in the late 1960s, and gathering momentum through the 1970s, Bishop began to project a new presence within the academy. Her latest book, Geography III, had been her most compelling. The leaders of important critical constituencies had begun speaking out in favor of her work, thus granting permission to their disciples and students to explore her work more closely. And, as we've seen, shortly after Bishop's death, the rich and revealing Bishop archive housed in the Vassar College Library would become available to scholars. A more complex and engaging biographical portrait of the artist stood ready to emerge. The elements essential to the launching of the Bishop phenomenon had almost come together.

But Bishop's triumph has extended beyond the academy. Perhaps the single most influential piece of advocacy with a broader public came through the medium Jarrell had most feared: television. The Voices and Visions series, created by the New York Center for Visual History under the supervision of Bishop stalwart Helen Vendler, was aired over the Public Broadcasting System in 1988. The series placed Bishop in a thirteen-poet pantheon that included all of the most imposing and familiar names in American poetry. Bishop was one of only four poets born in the twentieth century to appear in the series, the others being Langston Hughes, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath. At a single stroke, this series vastly increased the readership for Bishop and gave her work a new aura of glamour and legitimacy. It also made available to newly interested readers a taste of the human background and visual environment out of which her work emerged.

Bishop was at last ready to move from the coterie status of “writer's writer's writer” to the altogether new status of “hot poet.”

V. ASSIMILATION OF THE INTRINSIC QUALITIES OF THE WORK

The work of individual artists is assimilated by its potential audience at widely differing rates. The intrinsic qualities of the work of some really superb artists—the composer Joseph Haydn is one example—so mirror the requirements of the culture in which they live that these qualities are assimilated immediately by the artist's potential audience. Haydn, greeted by nearly universal comprehension and approbation throughout Europe while he lived, suffered thereafter from nearly a century of relative condescension and neglect—the “Papa Haydn” syndrome—as the critical paradigms and cultural perspectives of romanticism replaced those of classicism. The scope of Haydn's achievement would only be recognized again in recent decades, when the cultural and critical climate had again become propitious.⁵¹ The intrinsic characteristics of other brilliant creative figures may not achieve assimilation until many years after the creator's death. In such cases, eventual assimilation may not be possible except as the result of strenuous advocacy under more favorable critical and cultural conditions.

Until the mid-1970s, the intrinsic qualities of Bishop's work were very largely unassimilated by the academy or by all but a very narrow segment of the literary world. Except among a familiar circle of active writers who displayed an “extraordinarily intense loyalty,”⁵² Bishop's work was commonly greeted by a bemused and condescending style of commentary, as when, in a 1956 review, the academic critic Edwin Honig referred to Bishop's Poems as a “limited performance,” and complained that while “the poems arrest by their brilliant surfaces and transparency … underneath is a curious rigidity, a disturbing lack of movement and affective life, betraying a sprained and uneasy patience.”⁵³ In the early years, many readings of Bishop seemed blinded by her “brilliant surfaces,” vexed by a “transparency” apparently too absolute to allow the reader to see the life beneath. Hence the tone of dismissal mixed with irritation in so many early notices of her work. When, in a 1957 review titled “Imagism and Poetesses,” A. Alvarez wrote, “Miss Bishop's poetic imagination does not, so far as I can see, deal directly with her feelings; instead it provides her with scenes, and she feels about them,” or when in a 1969 piece Jerome Mazzaro wrote that “the separate observations of her poems do not gain from appearing in concert with one another. An unconscious element which might … serve as the link by way of recurrent, unresolved patterns is minimal,” or when, in a 1974 piece, Peggy Rizza wrote that Bishop “possesses what might be called an ‘objective imagination,’ … her … poems are absent of the pathetic fallacy,” these and similar readings had so far failed to assimilate the leading characteristics intrinsic to Bishop's verse.⁵⁴ Until that assimilation had become more general, the Bishop phenomenon could not take place. Thanks, in part, to the determined efforts of many poets, critics, editors, and biographers, Bishop's readers have learned to glimpse beneath those dazzling surfaces to witness the movement, the affective life, the keen dynamics of feeling, the unconscious elements, the recurrent, unresolved patterns, and the engaging play of subjective and objective imagination that animate and complicate Bishop's written world. Readers will continue to disagree about how Bishop should be read and to dispute the meaning of her legacy, but “surface” readings like those just outlined are unlikely to ever regain the ascendancy they once enjoyed.

For as the other principles I've described above began to work in Bishop's favor, as cultural perspectives began to shift in ways that valued the marginal, the silenced, the “queer,” and the female, as critics began to search for alternatives to the dominance of the “confessional” model, as a compelling range of new evidence, beginning with Bishop's own late poetry, began to alter dramatically the reading public's view of Bishop as a person and an artist, and as Bishop began to enjoy the advocacy of critics within the academy who represented a broad range of competing academic constituencies, the moment was ripe for the assimilation of a body of work whose artistic qualities were as unique as they were compelling. When readers began to look closely at the stunning range of verse and prose that Bishop had produced, they stood poised to enter her extraordinary, powerful, disquieting, and strangely appealing artistic world.

I began this essay by citing Jarrell's forecast that Bishop would be read with Homer, Dickinson, Stevens, and “the other classical American poets still alive among us.” Robert Lowell, perhaps Bishop's most frequent correspondent, made a similar, and equally spot-on, prediction regarding the success of her letters: “When Elizabeth Bishop's letters are published (as they will be), she will be recognized as not only one of the best, but one of the most prolific writers of our century.”⁵⁵ James Merrill spoke of her as an “extraordinary, fresh genius,” and Mark Strand, echoing another remark of Merrill's, introduced Bishop at a 1977 reading as “our greatest national treasure.”⁵⁶ Two years later Robert Pinsky would wistfully observe, in a memorial tribute: “The obituaries for Elizabeth Bishop were not loud or hyperbolic; they were immensely respectful, and perhaps slightly uncomprehending, just like the ‘local museum’ that she drily invented to accept for vague public use the loner Crusoe's chattels. The year 1979 may be remembered for her loss, long after many of the clowns, heroes, and villains of our headlines fade from memory.”⁵⁷ How did readers like Moore, Jarrell, Lowell, Merrill, Strand, and Pinsky anticipate a phenomenon that has taken others by storm so much later? Why, to cite Pinsky's remarks again, did these readers “find the emotional force and penetration of her work simply amazing”? Why did they see her as “profoundly ambitious”? Why did they discover in her work a “geography of survival”? Why did they notice the way, in a Bishop line, “the wit is made to bear up triumphantly under the pressure of a large intellectual construct—the way wit operates in Shakespeare”?—when, all the while, other readers were finding only the “charming little stained-glass bits here and there.”⁵⁸ They found these qualities, I think, because they looked for them. They read Bishop's poetry with a care, an authority, and a sympathy not widely in evidence until much later: a sympathy that grew out of a shared respect for the rigors and rewards of serious art, an authority that grew out of their own mastery of a demanding craft, and a care that grew out of an intuition for quality that remains genuinely rare even in the literary portion of our present culture. As a result, these readers assimilated many of the complex array of qualities intrinsic to Bishop's work well in advance of the general reading public. These readers may not have been able to predict the sequence of factors that would create a cultural climate ready to accord Bishop a sympathetic and informed reading. As McClatchy's dismissal of the “tides of literary fashion” and “feminist boosterism” appears to indicate, certain “writer's writers” might even refuse to acknowledge the role such factors have unquestionably played in creating the Bishop phenomenon. But it is surely significant that three generations of finely tuned literary intelligences, of writers and readers with tested ears for words and a keenly-honed command of their craft, knew for a certainty that Bishop's time would come. Shifts in the cultural perspective, alterations in the critical paradigm, the impact of emerging evidence, and the din of even the most clamorous advocates cannot by themselves create a major writer. The goods really have to be there.

Donald Sheehan, in the process of an early attempt to place Bishop in a pastoral tradition reaching back to Virgil, lamented in 1971 that Bishop's poems “give off no allusive resonance whatsoever.”⁵⁹ Critics have now overcome this early difficulty and have learned to read Bishop in the context of many important lines of poetic and intellectual development that had been more or less unavailable to earlier generations of readers. Bishop has been read as extending the line of metaphysical poetry running in this century through Eliot. She has likewise been read as extending the line of baroque prose running in this century through Hopkins. She has been placed as an American nature poet by various readers who see her as extending or subverting its traditions. She has been read as a disciple of and a rebel against the Wordsworthian nature lyric. She has been read as an erotic poet, a political poet, a travel poet, a poet of childhood. She has been read across the spectrum of feminist poetics. She has been placed in the tradition of a postcolonial, multicultural critique. She has been read as a neopragmatist, a neoformalist, and a postmodernist. And this array of readings, each of which makes plausible claims to validity, seems merely to scratch the surface. Other avenues have been barely explored at this writing but are ripe for future attention.

As I have suggested, literary historians did not initiate this process of rereading. They have in fact been lagging behind a process so far dominated by poets, editors, biographers, and author-centered critics. Together, these have made a compelling case for Bishop's deep involvement in most of the main currents of mid-century American poetry. Bishop's recognized achievement and her place in the canon now pose a problem to literary historians that must be addressed. Just as that peculiar poet Emily Dickinson, who seemed to come from nowhere and to speak a unique language, had somehow to be placed, Bishop's prominence now demands a reshaping of outmoded constructs once intended to take us “from modern to contemporary,” and this reshaping promises to help us understand that process in a new way.

Let me conclude by alluding to a single aspect of this question that currently engages my attention. What if one were to recognize Bishop's demonstrable importance to a circle once perceived as the sole domain of such male poets as Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman? And what if one were to apply many of the approaches to reading Bishop outlined above to the work of this expanded and more complexly gendered circle? One might find that the entire dynamic of their relations undergoes a startling change and not just because of the addition of a woman. Bishop's example might suggest the need to think again about the way we approach the relation between autobiography and fictive art in mid-century American poetry, the need to think again about how these poets use childhood as an artistic material, about how they construct a grammar of dreams, how they implicate pictures and other visual objects in a verbal space, how they incorporate prose rhythms and speech patterns into their verse, and how they deal with problems of knowledge, history, culture, grief, and loss in an environment of epistemological uncertainty. Such a study might help to show how each of these artists escaped the limitations of documentary realism and the excesses of confessionalism. One wants to ask, as well, if each of these poets, male or female, might have had occasion to view the world through the “eye of the outsider”? Could the affinity between Bishop and a poet like Lowell, who spent significant portions of his life under confinement in prison or in mental institutions, and who suffered from a major neurological disorder that remained undiagnosed until well into adulthood, be partly explained by a shared experience of outsiderhood? United by a commitment to a demanding art, what anxieties, animosities, and affinities did each of these poets feel as they eyed one another across lines partly defined by gender? Such cross-genderal studies offer a potentially significant new direction to the historian who proposes to examine a more fully gendered postmodernism. In any case, Bishop's presence as an artistic touchstone was strong in the minds of these poetic contemporaries, and it has emerged as a phenomenon to be reckoned with today.

Notes

1. Randall Jarrell, “The Year in Poetry,” in his Kipling, Auden & Co.: Essays and Reviews, 1935-1964 (New York, 1980), pp. 244-45.

2. John Ashbery, “Second Presentation to the Jury,” World Literature Today, 1 (Winter 1977), 8.

3. David Kalstone, Five Temperaments (New York, 1977), p. 12.

4. Anne Stevenson, Elizabeth Bishop (New Haven, 1966).

5. James E. B. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary (Chicago, 1984), pp. 3-4.

6. John Malcolm Brinnin, The Elizabeth Bishop Bulletin, 2 (Summer 1993), 2.

7. Langdon Hammer, “The New Elizabeth Bishop,” Yale Review (Winter 1993), 134; hereafter cited in text as NE.

8. Thomas Travisano, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development (Charlottesville, Va., 1988), p. 3. Two weeks after this book appeared, the second book on Elizabeth Bishop in twenty-two years reached the public: Robert Dale Parker, The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop (Urbana, Ill., 1988).

9. Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (Madison, Wis., 1989), pp. 3-19.

10. J. D. McClatchy, review of Bishop's One Art: Letters, New York Times Book Review (17 April 1994), 1.

11. “Books of the Day,” Chicago Times Herald (1 June 1899), 9, in Kate Chopin, The Awakening, 2nd ed., ed. Margo Culley (New York, 1994), p. 166.

12. James Merrill, “Elizabeth Bishop, 1911-1979,” in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1983), p. 259. First published in New York Review of Books (6 December 1979), 6.

13. Charles P. Elliot, “Minor Poet with a Major Fund of Love,” Life (4 July 1969), 13.

14. Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (Boston, 1986), pp. 7, 54. Ostriker comments more positively on the more autobiographical poems of Geography III (New York, 1976), Bishop's last book.

15. Betsy Erkkila, The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History and Discord (New York, 1992), p. 150.

16. Letter to U. T. and Joseph Summers, 1 March 1979. Quoted in Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender, ed. Marilyn May Lombardi (Charlottesville, Va., 1993), p. 113; hereafter cited in text as GG.

17. Mutlu Konuk Blasing calls attention to this phrase, quoted from Elizabeth Spires, “The Art of Poetry XXVII,” Paris Review, 80 (1981), 80, in the lead sentence of a recent article, “From Gender to Genre and Back: Elizabeth Bishop and ‘The Moose,’” American Literary History, 6 (1994), 285.

18. Adrienne Rich, “The Eye of the Outsider: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop,” Boston Review, 8 (April 1983), 16; hereafter cited in text.

19. Joanne Feit Diehl, “Bishop's Sexual Poetics,” in GG, p. 17.

20. Lorrie Goldensohn, “The Body's Roses: Race, Sex, and Gender in Elizabeth Bishop's Representations of the Self,” in GG, p. 73.

21. Jeredith Merrin, “Elizabeth Bishop: Gaiety, Gayness and Change,” in GG, p. 160; hereafter cited in text.

22. Adrian Oktenberg, “The Letter and the Spirit,” The Women's Review of Books, 11 (July 1994), 28; hereafter cited in text as LS.

23. Charles Tomlinson, “Elizabeth Bishop's New Book,” review of Bishop's Questions of Travel, in Shenandoah, 17 (Winter 1966), 89; hereafter cited in text as EB.

24. Victoria Harrison, Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy (New York, 1993), p. 142.

25. Barbara Page, “Off-Beat Claves, Oblique Realities: The Key West Notebooks of Elizabeth Bishop,” in GG, p. 210.

26. A session titled “Elizabeth Bishop's Translations,” organized and chaired by Josef Raab, was devoted to readings of Bishop along these lines at the December 1994 MLA.

27. One field likely to emerge in the near future that will also find Bishop ahead of the curve is the field of childhood studies. For an early treatment see Mary Kinzie, The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose (Chicago, 1993), pp. 88-100.

28. M. L. Rosenthal, The New Modern Poetry: British and American Poetry Since World War II (New York, 1967), p. 25.

29. Peter Stitt, “The Art of Poetry: An Interview with John Berryman,” Paris Review, 53 (Winter 1972); cited in Berryman's Understanding: Reflections on the Poetry of John Berryman, ed. Harry Thomas (Boston, 1988), p. 21.

30. Rosenthal, The New Modern Poetry, p. 26.

31. M. L. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets (New York, 1960), pp. 253-55.

32. See my Elizabeth Bishop, pp. 151-56 and Kalstone, Becoming a Poet, pp. 166-71. Kalstone stresses emerging differences, while I stress Lowell's debt to Bishop, but both readings agree on how intimately entwined were Bishop and Lowell, artistically and psychologically.

33. Jacket blurb for Robert Lowell's Life Studies (New York, 1959).

34. Octavio Paz, “Elizabeth Bishop, or The Power of Reticence,” in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, p. 213.

35. Bishop to Lowell, quoted from Charles Thornbury, “Introduction” to John Berryman, Collected Poems, 1937-1971 (New York, 1989), p. xvii.

36. Dana Gioia, “The Example of Elizabeth Bishop,” in his Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture (St. Paul, Minn., 1992), p. 237.

37. J. D. McClatchy, “Some Notes on ‘One Art,’” in his White Paper on Contemporary Poetry (New York, 1989), pp. 140-41.

38. James McCorkle, The Still Performance: Writing, Self, and Interconnection in Five Postmodern American Poets (Charlottesville, Va., 1989), pp. 11, 9.

39. Ashbery, “Second Presentation,” 8.

40. John Ashbery, review of Bishop's The Complete Poems, in New York Times Book Review (1 June 1969), 8.

41. Ashbery, “Second Presentation,” 10.

42. Denis Donoghue, Connoisseurs of Chaos (New York, 1984), p. xxi.

43. Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York, 1982), p. 484, n. 52.

44. Alan Williamson, Introspection and Contemporary Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p. 2.

45. Alan Williamson, “A Cold Spring: The Poet of Feeling,” in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, p. 96.

46. Tom Paulin, “Newness and Nowness: The Extraordinary Brilliance of Elizabeth Bishop's Letters,” Times Literary Supplement (29 April 1994), p. 3; hereafter cited in text as NN.

47. Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (New York, 1994), p. 643.

48. For a review of these and other recent publications see my “Surveying Bishop Scholarship: Publications since 1990,” in Elizabeth Bishop Bulletin, 2 (Summer 1993), 4-5.

49. Kalstone, Five Temperaments, p. 12.

50. My own rather early start in Bishop studies benefited both from Bishop's extended later contact with the academic and literary world and from some of her more sporadic early contacts with those worlds. I was introduced to Bishop's work in my first year of graduate study at the University of Virginia in 1975 in an introductory-level class taught by Alan Williamson, a poet-Ph.D. from Harvard who knew Bishop's work from that milieu, where he had chiefly studied with and written on Robert Lowell. Williamson soon departed for another post, but my own work on Bishop was able to continue in a 1977 seminar on contemporary poetry directed by visiting poet Mark Strand, a longtime devotee of Bishop who had known her during a Fullbright-sponsored visit to Brazil. My dissertation on Bishop began that same year under the direction of J. C. Levenson, a scholar recognized primarily for his work on Henry Adams and his contemporaries. Levenson had developed an enthusiasm for Bishop under the encouragement of one of her few early friends in the academic world, Joseph Summers, a specialist in metaphysical poetry and Levenson's classmate from an earlier era at Harvard. This fortuitous sequence of academic mentors positioned me to begin a thesis on Bishop just after the publication of Geography III. Other budding enthusiasts for Bishop's work may not have been so fortunately placed.

51. Indeed, the present vogue for Haydn and Mozart must bear some relation to the present vogue for Bishop: Mozart and Bishop in particular might be said to create “quicksilver works lined with dark moral clouds.”

52. Ashbery, “Second Presentation,” 8.

53. Edwin Honig, “Poetry Chronicle,” Patisan Review, 23 (Winter 1956), 115.

54. A. Alvarez, “Imagism and Poetesses,” Kenyon Review, 19 (Spring 1957), 325; Jerome Mazarro, “Elizabeth Bishop's Poems,” Shenandoah, 20 (Summer 1969), 100; Peggy Rizza, “Another Side of this Life: Women as Poets,” in American Poetry Since 1960: Some Critical Perspectives, ed. Robert B. Shaw (Chester Springs, Pa., 1974), p. 170.

55. Lowell, book jacket of One Art: Letters (New York, 1994).

56. James Merrill from Voices and Visions: Elizabeth Bishop television series; Mark Strand, “Elizabeth Bishop Introduction,” in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, p. 243.

57. Robert Pinsky, “Elizabeth Bishop, 1911-1979,” in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, p. 257.

58. Pinsky, p. 256 and Oscar Williams, “New Verse: North & South,” New Republic (21 October 1946), 525, quoted in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, p. 185.

59. Donald Sheehan, “The Silver Sensibility,” Contemporary Literature, 12 (Winter 1971), 99-120.