[In the following essay, Xiaojing argues that “Rainy Season; SubTropics” contains essential clues to Bishop's poetics.]

Elizabeth Bishop's prose poem, “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics,” though one of her least commented-on works, contains important articulations by Bishop about herself as a poet, and about her poetic principles and practice.¹ At the same time, its three monologues are relentless and revealing investigations of multifaceted subjectivity as captured in diverse voices through three animal personae. Both the form and content of these monologues are at once an assimilation of and a resistance to the confessional practice in American poetry.

“Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics” first appeared in Kenyon Review in November, 1967 as a response to what Bishop saw as the excesses of confessional poetry. Earlier in the year, Bishop commented on confessional poets' work in Time (2 June 1967): “Now the idea is that we live in a horrible and terrifying world, and the worst moments of horrible and terrifying lives are an allegory of the world. … The tendency is to overdo the morbidity. You just wish they'd keep some of these things to themselves.”² Bishop's rejection of this “morbidity” reflects her aesthetic principles and world outlook rather than a belief in an impersonal poetic stance. A few years later, in another interview, Bishop again favored an indirect approach over directly confessional self-disclosure: “T. S. Eliot, though, was right, I think, when he said that the more you try to express yourself, the less you really express. So much poetry I see seems self-indulgent.”³

Bishop avoids self-indulgence in the monologues of “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics” by engaging others in a dialogic exploration and expression of the self. For Bishop, indirection is necessary for effective expression. It is also the result of her dialogic presentation of ideas and values This oblique approach in her work has been identified by some feminist critics as a central strategy, typical of women's writing, which helped her gain “greater acceptance within the main (male) tradition of Western poetry than many women writers have achieved.”⁴ Analysis of Bishop's technique exclusively in terms of a female tradition, though, runs the risk of overlooking the complexity and merit of her artistry and her ideas by reducing them to mainly a consequence of her gender.⁵ Responding to the prospect of a women's issue of Little Magazine in 1971, Bishop states:

… I have never believed in segregating the sexes in any way, including the arts … It is true there are very few women poets, painters, etc.,—but I feel that to print them or exhibit them apart from works by men poets, painters, etc., is just to illustrate in this century, Dr. Johnson's well-known remark—rather to seem to agree with it.⁶

Rather than simply to evade the negative effects of being labelled a “woman poet,” it was in order to reject the notion of “segregating” creative works in gender-based categories that Bishop always refused to be included in any anthology which consisted only of works by women.⁷

Even though Bishop recognizes gender difference in matters of artistic creation, indirection, for her, is first and foremost an aesthetic approach and axiological consequence rather than a self-protective technique. In a conversation with George Starbuck in 1977, Bishop said, “Sometimes I think if I had been born a man I probably would have written more. Dared more, or been able to spend more time at it. I've wasted a great deal of time.”⁸ Bishop's awareness of the disadvantages of her gender, and the resulting psychological and social burden involved, may have contributed to her indirect approach. But gender is not by any means the most important explanation of the choice or manner of “the oblique approach” in her poems.

An examination of Bishop's “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics” in connection with its historical literary context and to Bishop's own beliefs and artistic principles will offer a fuller understanding of Bishop's poetics and her strategy of “indirection.” The technical strategies and content of “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics” reflect Bishop's convictions and her response to the practice of confessional poems of the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1960s, Bishop found the waves of change taking place in American poetry provocative.⁹ At times, though, she found herself depressed by what was going on, as she complained to Robert Lowell in March, 1961:

I get so depressed with every number of poetry, the new yorker, etc. (This one I am swearing off of, except for prose, forever, I hope—) so much adequate poetry all sounding just alike and so boring—or am I growing frizzled small and stale or however you put it? There seems to be too much of everything—too much painting, too much poetry, too many novels—and much too much money, I suppose. … And no one really feeling anything much.¹⁰

The vogue of confessional poems made Bishop question her own ideas about poetry, and her response to it was thoughtful and cautious at the beginning. She felt ambivalent about Berryman's 77 Dream Songs (1964). “I am pretty much at sea about that book,” Bishop wrote to Lowell on 1October 1964. Apart from her uncertainty, Bishop carefully expressed her disapproval of Berryman's “too personal” confession: “Some pages I find wonderful, some baffle me completely. I am sure he is saying something important—perhaps sometimes too personal?” (Millier 361).

To Anne Stevenson, Bishop also expressed her admiration for and bafflement at Berryman's poems. But she was more frank and confident with Stevenson than she had been in her letter to Lowell:

Berryman echoes: “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Stevens, Cummings, Lowell, a bit; Pound, etc etc.—but it is quite an extraordinary performance, although I think I really understand probably barely half of it. If I were a critic and had a good brain I think I'd like to write a study of “The School of Anguish”—Lowell (by far the best), Roethke, and Berryman and their descendants like Anne Sexton and Siedel, more and more anguish and less and less poetry. Surely never in all the ages has poetry been so personal and confessional—and I don't think it is what I like, really—although I certainly admire Lowell.

(27 October 1964, Millier 361)

For Bishop, excessive anguish and confession are treated at the cost of artistry—“more and more anguish and less and less poetry”—in poems which are “so personal and confessional.”

As she came to hear and read more confessional poems and the works of the Beat poets during the 1960s, Bishop became more articulate in her comments. In 1968, according to her biographer, Brett Millier, Bishop did poetry readings “twice in San Francisco, once at the Museum of Modern Art and once at Glide Memorial, the so-called hippy church, in a benefit for striking teachers at San Francisco State University” (412-13). Bishop said, in a letter to James Merrill, that she did the reading out of “curiosity and friendship,” rather than “anything idealistic.” And she wanted to see the famous San Francisco writers and poets whom she had never met. Even though she “smoked a little marijuana at the reading and decided she liked Richard Brautigan” (Millier 413), Bishop felt herself to be an outsider. To Merrill, she wrote,

… in general, I'm afraid, I'm just a member of the eastern establishment to everyone here, and definitely passee. I don't mind. I thought that Thom Gunn's poems and mine were the best!—the rest were propaganda that takes me back to my college days and the WPA theatre and so on—propaganda, or reportage of all-too-familiar events.¹¹

For Bishop, poetry is reduced to propaganda and reportage when artistic values are sacrificed for the sake of sensationalism or politics. However, she is equally against sacrificing the poet's social responsibility for the sake of art.

These principles are stated passionately in another letter to Lowell. Responding to Lowell's use and alterations of his second wife Elizabeth Hardwick's letters to him in his poems to be published in The Dolphin (1973), Bishop wrote: “… It's hell to write this, so please first do believe I think Dolphin is magnificent poetry. It is also honest poetry—almost …” To make her point, Bishop quoted a passage from Thomas Hardy:

Here is a quotation from dear little Hardy that I copied out years ago—long before Dolphin, or even the Notebooks, were thought of. It's from a letter written in 1911. … (Not exactly the same situation as Dolphin, but fairly close.)

“What should certainly be protested against, in cases where there is no authorization, is the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions. Infinite mischief would lie in that. If any statements in the dress of fiction are covertly hinted to be fact, all must be fact, and nothing else but fact, for obvious reasons. The power of getting lies believed about people through that channel after they are dead, by stirring in a few truths, is a horror to contemplate.”

I'm sure my point is only too plain. Lizzie is not dead, etc.—but there is a “mixture of fact & fiction”, and you have changed her letters. That is “infinite mischief”, I think. … One can use one's life material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren't you violating a trust? if you were given permission—If you hadn't changed them … etc. But art just isn't worth that much.

(21 March 1972)¹²

And she expressed her ideas about confessional poetry with much more frankness and confidence than before.

In general, I deplore the “confessional”—however, when you wrote Life Studies perhaps it was a necessary movement, and it helped make poetry more real, fresh and immediate. But now—ye gods—anything goes, and I am so sick of poems about the students' mothers & fathers and sex-lives and so on. All that can be done—but at the same time one surely should have a feeling that one can trust the writer—not to distort, tell lies, etc.

… I just hate the level we seem to live and think and feel on at present … I can't bear to have anything you write tell—perhaps—what we're really like in 1972—perhaps it's as simple as that. But are we?

(L 562-63)

Apart from reiterating her impatience with the reportage treatment of biographical material, Bishop's acknowledgement of the contribution of Lowell's Life Studies to poetry in general reflects her own belief in revolt that makes poetry “more real, fresh and immediate.” Two years later, Bishop explained to Lowell in another letter that she had no objection to the kind of “confession” in his Life Studies, except for other poets' excessive use of sexuality as subject matter. “Well, you've been blamed for starting some of that, we know—but there's all the difference in the world between ‘Life Studies’ and those who now out-sex Anne Sexton” (22 January 1974, Millier 490).

The American poetry scene forced Bishop to reexamine her own ideas about poetry and her poetic practice. These reexaminations are carried out in “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics” through a dialogue with herself and others in monologues subtitled “Giant Toad,” “Strayed Crab,” and “Giant Snail.”

These animal personae engage in self-examination and self-expression similar to those in confessional poems; their personal anguish, private thoughts, and individual personalities are also the subject matter of this prose poem. Nevertheless, their “self-indulgent” emotions, feelings, and thoughts are dealt with in mockery and parody. Bishop combines various technical devices to make her animal speakers “intensely interesting and painfully applicable to every reader,” as she says of Robert Lowell's personae in Life Studies.¹³ The monologues create “an esthetic experience” of recognition and identification for the reader rather than offering the reader “a slight thrill of detection.” Bishop discusses how this effect can be achieved by using “‘physical’ words” properly in a letter to May Swenson:

It's a problem of placement, choice of word, abruptness or accuracy of the image—and does it help or detract? It sticks out of the poem so that all the reader is going to remember is “That Miss Swenson is always talking about phalluses”—or is it phalli?—you have spoiled your effect, obviously, and given the Freudian-minded contemporary reader just a slight thrill of detection rather than an esthetic experience.

(3 July 1958, L 361)

The physical characteristics of Bishop's Giant Toad, Strayed Crab, and Giant Snail accurately match their descriptions of themselves, including their boasts and complaints. Bishop's use of animal personae also assimilates a time-honored satiric device found in such works as the fables of La Fontaine, in which human follies are exposed through the foibles of non-human characters.

The prose poem's descriptive, meditative, and narrative characteristics, and its lack of metrical strictures, provide Bishop with a fitting form to depict both the spiritual and physical aspects of her animal personae, and to reveal both their private and social selves.¹⁴ The prose poem form was often adopted by French Surrealist poets partly because of its escape from the metrical constraint. According to Michael Benedikt, Charles Baudelaire was “the originator” who first consciously practiced the form to explore its poetic possibilities.¹⁵ In a letter to his friend Arsene Houssaye published as the preface to Short Prose Poems, later issued as Paris Spleen (1869), Baudelaire asks:

Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamt of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and ragged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reveries, the jibes of consciences?¹⁶

As Rosemary Lloyd says, in her introduction to Baudelaire's The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo (1991), the prose poem offers the possibilities of “rapid changes of mood and of combinations of pathos and comedy, lyricism and irony.”¹⁷ After Baudelaire, Comte de Lautreamont and Arthur Rimbaud used the prose poem form as a way of breaking away from conventional poetic composition, and as a means of exploring and revealing the unconscious.

William Rees, editor of French Poetry 1820-1950 (1990), contends that Rimbaud's collection of prose poems, Les Illuminations, destroyed “the old rhetoric that enslaved even his predecessor Baudelaire.” In so doing, he was able to “pursue self-knowledge to an extreme degree to discover and communicate his deepest impulses, however irrational, discontinuous and disturbing both the process and its expression may be …”¹⁸ And the oneiric, hallucinatory and disturbing contents of Lautreamont's prose poems Chants de Maldoror anticipated Surrealist poetry. In his 1935 lecture on “Situation of the Surrealist Object,” published in Manifestoes of Surrealism, Andre Breton praised the prose poems of Lautreamont and Rimbaud for their “deliberate abandonment of these worn-out combinations” such as “meter, rhythm, rhymes,” which he considered “completely exterior,” and “arbitrary.”¹⁹ Surrealist poets widely employed the prose poem form in their efforts to explore and present unconscious irrationality.

By combining interior monologue with the prose poem, Bishop achieves greater flexibility and opens new possibilities for revealing the multiple, complex facets of her personae in “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics.” Each of these prose-poem monologues reveals the coexistence of many contradictions and conflicts within the speaking subject. The multiple voices within each of them, combined with the interactions between these animal personae, demonstrate the social, communal nature of thought and self-consciousness.

Self-mockery is used in all three monologues to enable the speaker to simultaneously articulate private thoughts and parody others' voices and viewpoints with a certain amount of humor and freedom, while maintaining the distance between the speaker and the poet. The Giant Toad's monologue begins with anguish, humility, and self-indulgence:

I am too big, too big by far. Pity me.

My eyes bulge and hurt. They are my one great beauty, even so. They see too much, above, below, and yet there is not much to see. The rain has stopped. The mist is gathering on my skin in drops. … Perhaps the droplets on my mottled hide are pretty, like dewdrops, silver on a moldering leaf? They chill me through and through. I feel my colors changing now, my pigments gradually shudder and shift over.

Now I shall get beneath that overhanging ledge. Slowly. Hop. Two or three times more, silently. That was too far. I'm standing up. The lichen's gray, and rough to my front feet. Get down. Turn facing out, it's safer. Don't breathe until the snail gets by. But we go travelling the same weathers.

Swallow the air and mouthfuls of cold mist. Give voice, just once. O how it echoed from the rock! What a profound, angelic bell I rang!²⁰

Even though the toad suffers from a painful self-consciousness about its size, it cannot resist a narcissistic tendency. Its apparent self-awareness is undercut by a strain of egocentrism and a self-congratulatory tone.

The toad becomes totally helpless and vulnerable in the hands of “some naughty children,” who put lit cigarettes in its mouth and the mouths of its “two brothers,” and made it “sick for days.” After this traumatic experience, the toad is no longer coy in asserting its confidence in itself. Its utterances become hostile and menacing:

I have big shoulders, like a boxer. They are not muscle, however, and their colour is dark. They are my sacs of poison, the almost unused poison that I bear, my burden and my great responsibility. Big wings of poison, folded on my back. Beware, I am an angel in disguise; my wings are evil, but not deadly. If I will it, the poison could break through, blue-black, and dangerous to all. Blue-black fumes would rise upon the air. Beware, you frivolous crab.

(CP 139)

The toad's warning of its dangerous power is reminiscent of Coleridge's warning about the awesome creative power of the deified poet in “Kubla Khan”: “Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair! / Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise.” But unlike the power of Coleridge's inspired poet, the toad's articulation of its potential power is ambivalent. Its emphasis on its angelic disguise, its evil wings and sacs of poison, in part, signify a disassociation from what Bishop regarded as self-congratulatory writings, such as W. D. Snodgrass's Heart's Needle, which to Bishop indicated: “I do all these awful things but don't you think I'm really nice” (Kalstone 208). Bishop discerned a similar quality in Anne Sexton and some other women writers. In a letter to Lowell, she wrote:

That Anne Sexton I think still has a bit too much romanticism and what I think of as the “our beautiful old silver” school of female writing, which is really boasting about how “nice” we were. … I wrote a story at Vassar that was too much admired by Miss Rose Peebles, my teacher, who was very proud of being an old-school Southern lady—and suddenly this fact about women's writing dawned on me, and has haunted me ever since.

(27 July 1960, L 386-87)

The qualities Bishop disliked are parodied in the Giant Toad's monologue. In an earlier letter to her friend Ilse Barker, a fiction writer, Bishop explained her dislike of the self-congratulatory tone in some women writers' work: “It is that they are really boasting all the time. … It's the ‘How nice to be nice!’ atmosphere that gets me, and I think women writers must get quite away from it before they ever amount to a hill of beans. …” Further clarifying her idea in the same letter, Bishop referred to Flaubert: “(… although he's not my favorite writer by any means at least he's not hinting to you all the time about what fine feelings he has and what a dear rich old social background he had!).” She concluded: “I suppose it is at bottom a flaw in reality that irritates me so—not so much of being protected,—you can't blame them for that—but of wanting to show that they are even if they aren't” (28 February 1955).²¹

Bishop's irritation at what she considered unrealistically complacent female writing has to do partly with her own experience of gender discrimination in the literary world. In 1977, Bishop said that she refused to have her work included in women's anthologies, or in all-women issues of magazines while she was at college, because she “felt it was a lot of nonsense, separating the sexes,” and “this feeling,” she added, “came from feminist principles, perhaps stronger than I was aware of” (Starbuck 322). In the same conversation, Bishop complained about the prejudice women writers were up against.

Again, about “feminism” or Women's Lib. I think my friends, my generation, were at women's colleges mostly (and we weren't all writers). One gets so used, very young, to being “put down” that if you have normal intelligence and have any sense of humor you very early develop a tough, ironic attitude. You just try to get so you don't even notice being “put down.”

Most of my writing life I've been lucky about reviews. But at the very end they often say “The best poetry by a woman in this decade, or year, or month.” Well, what's that worth? You know. But you get used to it, even expect it, and are amused by it. One thing I do think is that there are undoubtedly going to be more good woman poets.

(Starbuck 323-4)

These mixed feelings of resentment against prejudice, of amusement at being “put down,” of a “tough ironic attitude,” and of confidence in her own as well as other women writers' creative competence are transformed and expressed through different voices in Giant Toad's utterances.

In this regard, “Giant Toad” is like what Bishop says of Marianne Moore's poem “Marriage”: “It is a poem which transforms a justified sense of injury into a work of art.”²² Indeed, the toad articulates a humorous anger Bishop shares with Moore, as her comments on “Marriage” show:

Perhaps it was pride or vanity that kept Moore from complaints, and that put her sense of injustice through the prisms dissected by “those various scalpels” into poetry. She was not too proud for occasional complaints; she was humorously angry, but nevertheless angry, when her publisher twice postponed her book in order to bring out two young male poets, both now almost unheard of.

(“Efforts of Affection” CPr144-5)

Using the mask of a victimized toad, Bishop also expresses with self-mocking humor her anger at gender discrimination. The employment of the grotesque speaker characterizes women's writing. The monstrous image women writers identify themselves with is a strategy of subversion, revision and self-articulation in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. In their study of nineteenth-century women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out how Mary Shelley identifies herself with the “monster” she creates, and how Christina Rosetti “represents her own anxiety of authorship in the split between one heroine who longs to ‘suck and suck’ on goblin fruit and another who locks her lips fiercely together in a gesture of silent and passionate renunciation.”²³ As Alicia Ostriker observes, “Much of The Madwoman in the Attic traces the image, in the nineteenth-century women's writing, of the monster the author fears she is or secretly craves to be as against the angel she wishes to be or to appear.” Ostriker continues to point out that “Among contemporary women poets, fascination with deformity seems also to capture a sense—guilty or gloating, defensive or aggressive—of unacceptable personal power”²⁴ Sylvia Plath, for instance, declares her rebirth in “Lady Lazarus” with aggressive threat: “Herr God, Herr Lucifer, / Beware / Beware. // Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.”²⁵

Bishop's toad shares these women writers' ambivalence, anger, confidence, and deliberate countering of the traditional orphic image of the poet. However, her confidence in her threat of hidden, dangerous power is undercut by helplessness and self-pity (“I am too big, too big by far. Pity me”). Although Bishop's persona, like Plath's Lady Lazarus, deliberately rejects an angelic image, it does not solely intend to convey menace with its alleged “evil” wings “dangerous to all.” The fact that its sacs of poison are its burden and also its “great responsibility” is reminiscent of Bishop's criticism of Lowell for sacrificing moral principle for art, and her emphasis on the poet's responsibility to tell the truth. The duality of responsibility and potential danger appears to reflect Bishop's sense of the poet's social responsibility and the danger of relinquishing it. Discussing her ideas about narrow psychoanalytical approaches to literature and art in a letter to Marianne Moore, Bishop said, “… everything I have read about it has made me think that psychologists misinterpret and very much underestimate all the workings of ART!” Then she cited a passage from Illusion and Reality by Christopher Caudwell to make her point:²⁶

Psychoanalysts do not see the poet, playing a social function, but regard him as a neurotic working off his complexes at the expense of the public. Therefore in analyzing a work of art psychoanalysts seek just those symbols that are peculiarly private, i.e. neurotic.

(7 September 1937, L 63)

This awareness of the poet's “social function” helps make Bishop's animal monologues dialogic in the sense that they involve other people's points of view, and are oriented toward what has already been uttered, as well as toward their audience.

The toad's utterances also echo Marianne Moore's warning to Bishop herself. Responding to another of Bishop's prose poems in a letter written on February 9, 1937, Moore said to her, “Your competence in THE HANGING of THE MOUSE is almost criminal. … Your faculty of projecting the imagination and maintaining an initial suggestion in absolute adjustment is a heavy responsibility for you.”²⁷ In another letter written about a year later, Moore's warning to Bishop became more direct and specific: “… I do feel that tentativeness and interiorizing are your danger as well as your strength” (1 May 1938, RM). Both Moore's humorous comment on Bishop's artistic capability and her warning of the responsibility of her art are incorporated into the Giant Toad's utterances, together with Bishop's sense of the burden suggested by the responsibility of her social function as a poet. Moore's warning to Bishop—“your danger as well as your strength”—is also transformed into the toad's big, boxer-like shoulders which contain its dangerous sacs of poison.

Although the toad's monologue, as Helen Vendler says of all three monologues, “contains reflections on Bishop's self and her art,” it alludes to other poets and their artistic practice, and articulates Bishop's comments on them as well.²⁸ The Giant Toad's monologue is more than a self-examination and self-revelation; it is a dialogue with others, as well as with itself. Its voice, self-admired as “a profound, angelic bell,” provokes a negative response from one of its neighbors, Strayed Crab, who regards it as nothing more than “a loud and hollow noise.” While being as self-appreciative as the toad, the crab articulates different convictions and preoccupations which more obviously invite associations with Bishop's own poetic style and practice, as well as her sense of outsiderhood—her being “passee” among the confessional and Beat poets.

This is not my home. How did I get so far from water? It must be over that way somewhere.

I am the color of wine, of tinta. The inside of my powerful fight claw is saffron-yellow. See, I see it now; I wave it like a flag. I am dapper and elegant; I move with great precision, cleverly managing all my smaller yellow claws. I believe in the oblique, the indirect approach, and I keep my feelings to myself.

(CP 140)

The Strayed Crab's descriptions of itself are reminiscent of Bishop's own formal elegance, precise description, and reticence. Like the self-disclosure in confessional poems, the crab's interior monologue expresses personal anguish and beliefs. Moreover, what is revealed here, among other things, is an intersection of worldviews and values through the crab's response to its two neighbors, the Giant Toad and the Giant Snail.

What is that big soft monster, like a yellow cloud, stifling and warm? What is it doing? It pats my back. Out, claw. There, I have frightened it away. It's sitting down, pretending nothing's happened. I'll skirt it. It's still pretending not to see me. Out of my way, O monster. I own a pool, all the little fish swim in it, and all the skittering waterbugs that smell like rotten apples.

Cheer up, O grievous snail. I tap your shell, encouragingly, not that you will ever know about it.

And I want nothing to do with you, either, sulking toad. Imagine, at least four times my size and yet so vulnerable … I could open your belly with my claw. You glare and bulge, a watchdog near my pool; you make a loud and hollow noise. I do not care for such stupidity. I admire compression, lightness, and agility, all rare in this loose world.

(CP 140)

Speaking through the voice of an insolent and arrogant crab, Bishop is able to daringly articulate her negative response to the excessive treatment of sexuality and anguish, the personal document, the lack of artistry, and the self-congratulatory tone she perceived in poems which she thinks demonstrate “more and more anguish and less and less poetry.” The crab's self-assurance echoes Bishop's self-confidence in her own art, as she expressed it after having direct contact with the San Francisco poets. In addition, the Strayed Crab's self-expression simultaneously describes the way a crab actually moves, and Bishop's own belief in “the oblique, the indirect approach,” and “compression … all rare in this loose world.”

Similarly, the Giant Snail articulates Bishop's response to others' ideas and utterances while describing with precision the physical condition of a snail:

… Although I move ghostlike and my floating edges barely graze the ground, I am heavy, heavy, heavy. My white muscles are already tired. I give the impression of mysterious ease, but it is only with the greatest effort of my will that I can rise above the smallest stones and sticks. And I must not let myself be distracted by those rough spears of grass. Don't touch them. Draw back. Withdrawal is always best.

(CP 141)

The appearance of ease in the snail's movement, and the actual difficulty involved, are analogous to the natural casualness of Bishop's poems and the immense effort such naturalness requires. In a letter to Marianne Moore written in 1954 from Brazil, Bishop expressed her frustration at the fact that some literary reviews seem to take writers' works for granted without being aware of the magnitude of difficulties they entail.

A friend brought our mail today, including the September Poetry—I object so much to Hugh Kenner most of the time but I do think he has written the best review by far that I've seen—I wonder if you like it, too? He also seems to be aware of the enormous difficulties more than other reviewers who somehow imply it was easy in an infuriating way.

(15 October 1954, RM)

The “absolute naturalness of tone” was one of the qualities Bishop admired in Herbert's poems, and one she laboured to achieve in her own work.²⁹ But “writing poetry is an unnatural act. It takes great skill to make it seem natural,” Bishop wrote in her notebook of 1936-37.³⁰ These ideas and her sense of the difficult struggle involved in her career are implied in the snail's self-expression: “I give the impression of mysterious ease, but it is only with the greatest effort of my will that I can rise above the smallest stones and sticks.”

Although knowing many of its weak points, the Giant Snail, like the Giant Toad, is highly aware of its own beauty, and takes pride in it. But at the same time it suffers from anguish over its weight, a self-consciousness that is ironically penetrated by its awareness of others' opinions.

… My blind, white bull's head was a Cretan scare-head; degenerate, my four horns that can't attack. The sides of my mouth are now my hands. they press the earth and suck it hard. Ah, but I know my shell is beautiful, and high, and glazed, and shining. I know it well, although I have not seen it. Its curled white lip is of the finest enamel. Inside, it is as smooth as silk, and I, I fill it to perfection.

My wide wake shines, now it is growing dark. I leave a lovely opalescent ribbon: I know this.

But Oh! I am too big. I feel it. Pity me.

(CP 141-2)

The abrupt shifting of tone and topic in the snail's monologue reflects its inner conflict between self-assurance and self-pity. Like the monologues of the toad and the crab, the snail's constant oscillations of mood and thought are accompanied by Bishop's meditations on artistic approaches and practices. The fact that both the Giant Snail and the Giant Toad are painfully self-conscious about their physique seems to be an ironic transformation of Bishop's awareness of the prejudice women writers suffer from, and her own sense of alienation as a result of her lesbianism and alcoholism.

Helen Vendler associates this sense of alienation with the artist's position in society. She regards the toad and the snail as analogies for the artist, like the strange creature, the man-moth, a protagonist of an early Bishop poem.

Like the toad and snail, the man-moth suffers from being physically unlike other creatures: he comes out of his subterranean home only at night and is alone in the populous city. It is tempting to see in this physicality that is alienated from its neighbors a metaphor for sexual difference, and Adrienne Rich has suggested that Bishop's “experience of outsiderhood” is “closely—though not exclusively—linked with the essential outsiderhood of a lesbian identity.” But the painful eyes of the giant toad are a burden equal to his abnormal size; the spiritual singularity of artists sets them socially apart, in the long run, whether they are sexual “outsiders” or not.

(286)³¹

But Bishop's technique of indirection reveals not only the complexity of her speakers' inner worlds, but also these speakers' awareness of and interactions with others. Their monologues contain the voices of others as well as Bishop's own. Her preoccupation with observation, and her own beliefs and concerns, are parodied along with others' attitudes and poetic practices.

In fact, these monologues are also Bishop's dialogues with other poets and literary critics, and with herself on matters of contemporary poetics and artistic principles. Different voices and points of view collide in Bishop's animal monologues through an internal dialogue within each monologue, as well as the dialogic interactions among them. The significant achievement of Bishop's prose poem lies in its display of the socially-shaped concept of the self as shown in the interior monologues of the animal speakers, which are simultaneously self-examination and self-expression, as well as responses to and mimicries of others' voices and attitudes. Bishop's assimilation of contemporary living voices in the dialogic monologues of her personae, and her artistic representation of the social and dialogic nature of discourse and subjectivity in “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics” give her art its complexity, depth, and immediacy.

“Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics” shows at once an absorption of the revolt in contemporary poetry against a New Critical impersonal poetic stance, and an opposition to its “too personal” elements. For Bishop, formal and emotional constraint is necessary for art. She told Marianne Moore in a letter of April 10, 1957:

I was just this morning reading a little book by Stravinsky and he says: “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more I limit my field of action and the more I surround my self with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength.” I immediately thought of you.

(RM)

Bishop admires Moore's poetry for its constraint and unique originality as well. “What I like best of all,” Bishop said to Moore about her book, What Are Years, “is the wonderful alone quality of it all like the piano alone in the middle of the concerto” (23 October 1941, RM). Constraint and anomaly are also the two qualities Bishop pursued in her own poems. As the speaker of Bishop's prose piece “In Prison” asserts, “… in a place where all dress alike I have the gift of being able to develop a ‘style’ of my own …” (CPr 190).

These prose poem monologues are an effective performance of Bishop's deliberate practice of being “unconventional, rebellious” against any norms of “fashion” within the tradition of poetry as opposed to “being a ‘rebel’” outside of it (CPr 189). In a letter of September 6, 1955 written to May Swenson, Bishop said, “I think myself that my best poems seem rather distant. … I don't think I'm very successful when I get personal,—rather, sound personal—one always is personal, of course, one way or another.”³² With the disguise of her animal personae, Bishop is able to “sound personal” without sacrificing creative discipline or her artistic and axiological principles. Not despite but because of this insistence on “the oblique, the indirect approach,” the self-exploration and expression conducted in “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics” carry the abiding conviction of Bishop's time in making poetry “more real, fresh and immediate.”

Notes

1. Lorrie Goldensohn mentions that the “prose poems in ‘Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics’ are saturated with the pain of the grieving human animal working the microphone behind the poem.” This is true, but these prose poems contain much more than pain, or grief. See Goldensohn, Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 278.

   In his discussion of Bishop's Surrealist inheritance, Richard Mullen groups “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics” with “The Monument” and “The Weed” as valuable examples of how Bishop “adopts the surrealists' principles into her writing,” because “their surrealist sources can be identified.” See Richard Mullen, “Elizabeth Bishop's Surrealist Inheritance,” American Literature 54 (March 1982): 65.

2. For Bishop's comments on Confessional poets, see “The Poets: Second Chance,” Time (2 June 1967): 68.

3. See Alexandra Johnson, Interview, “Poet Elizabeth Bishop: Geography of the Imagination,” Christian Science Monitor (23 March 1978): 21.

4. See Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller, “Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Rewards of Indirection,” New England Quarterly 57 (1984): 534.

5. Keller and Miller note that “as a literary tool, indirection in poetry is by no means peculiar to women. … Still, because of the great risks women have faced in expressing their aspirations or power openly, indirection characterizes much of women's writing particularly, as it does much of women's speech” (534). This may very well be true. But indirection as a literary device in both Dickinson's and Bishop's poems involves a great deal more than avoiding “the great risks.” Dickinson's Poem 1129, for instance, beginning “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” indicates that indirection here is not just a political precaution, but also an epistemological necessity.

6. See Little Magazine 5 (Fall-Winter 1971): 79.

7. One of the negative effects of being labelled a “woman poet” is the implication of intellectual poverty. For instance, John Crowe Ransom's article on Edna St. Vincent Millay and her “woman critic,” emphasizes that “man distinguishes himself from woman by intellect …” whereas a woman, being “less pliant, safer as biological organism … remains fixed in her famous attitudes, and is indifferent to intellectuality.” See Ransom, The World's Body (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), pp. 77-78. As Mary Ellman notes, “Books by women are treated as though they themselves were women.” See Ellman, Thinking about Women (New York: Harcourt, 1968), p. 29.

8. See George Starbuck, “‘The Work!’ A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop,” in Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess, eds., Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (Ann Arbor: The Univ. of Michigan Press, 1983), p. 329. All subsequent references to this interview will be given parenthetically within the text.

9. For a broad view of the American literary movements emerging in the 1950s and developing through the 1960s examined within an historical and cultural context, see Mark Doty, “The ‘Forbidden Planet’ of Character: The Revolutions of the 1950s,” and Leslie Ullman, “American Poetry in the 1960s,” in Jack Myers and David Wojahn eds., A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), pp. 131-157; pp. 190-223.

10. Bishop to Lowell, “Mid-March, 1961,” Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. See Brett Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 322. All subsequent references to this work will be given parenthetically within the text.

11. Bishop to James Merrill, 27 February 1969. Bishop's letters to Merrill are in the Elizabeth Bishop Collection, Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries, Poughkeepsie, New York. Permission granted from Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries, for use of this letter.

12. See Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Letters, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), pp. 561-62. All subsequent references to this edition will be given parenthetically within the text with the abbreviation of L.

13. Quoted in David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, ed. Robert Hemenway (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), p. 209. Subsequent references to this work will be given parenthetically within the text.

14. For a fairly comprehensive anthology of discussions on the prose poem in France, see Mary Ann Caws and Hermine Riffaterre, eds., The Prose Poem in France: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

15. Michael Benedikt, “Introduction,” The Prose Poem: An International Anthology (New York: New Directions, 1976), p. 43.

16. Charles Baudelaire, “To Arsene Houssaye,” Paris Spleen, trans. Louise Varese (New York: New Directions, 1970), pp. ix-x.

17. Rosemary Lloyd, “Introduction,” in Charles Baudelaire, The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. xiii.

18. William Rees, ed. trans. and intro., French Poetry, 1820-1950 with Prose Translations (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 283.

19. Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 262.

20. Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1987), p. 139. All subsequent references to this edition will be given parenthetically within the text with the abbreviation of CP.

21. Bishop's letter to Ilse Barker is in the Elizabeth Bishop Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton, New Jersey. Published with permission of the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries.

22. “Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore,” in Elizabeth Bishop, The Collected Prose, ed. and intro. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1984), p. 144. Subsequent references to this edition will be given parenthetically, with the abbreviation of CPr, in the text.

23. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 58-59.

24. Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), p. 74.

25. Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus,” Ariel (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), p. 9.

26. See Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1937).

27. Moore's letters of 9 February 1937 and 1 May 1938 to Bishop are in Marianne Moore Papers at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Permission to quote from Moore's unpublished letters by Marianne Craig Moore, Literary Executor for the Estate of Marianne Moore, and by the Rosenbach Museum and Library are gratefully acknowledged. Further references to material held by the Rosenbach Museum and Library will appear in the text with the abbreviation of “RM.”

28. Helen Vendler, “Elizabeth Bishop,” The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 284.

29. See Ashley Brown, “An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop,” in Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess, eds., Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1983), p. 294.

30. Bishop's notebooks are in the Elizabeth Bishop Collection, Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries. Permission to use unpublished material from Bishop's notebook by Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries, is gratefully acknowledged.

31. For Adrienne Rich's comments on Bishop's themes of “outsiderhood and marginality,” see “The Eye of the Outsider: Elizabeth Bishop's Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (1983),” in Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985 (New York: Norton, 1986), pp. 124-135.

32. May Swenson Papers, Olin Library, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. See Victoria Gail Harrison, Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 29.