“Elizabeth Bishop and Postmodernism,” in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, Fall, 1995, pp. 166-79.

[In the following essay, Page examines Bishop's place in the era of literature spanning from modernism to postmodernism.]

Though Elizabeth Bishop is a near-contemporary whose life and career have by now been well documented, she has proved curiously elusive to scholars attempting to place her among her poetic forebears and successors. This is partly owing to the delayed recognition of her work and her extraordinary posthumous fluorescence, but I shall argue that it is also partly owing to continuities among successive generations of poets that have been less well recognized than the differences among them. A further difficulty in placing Bishop securely in literary historical time, however, stems from conflicts among scholars over the segmentation and definition of poetic periods from the romantic era to our own. In this essay, I shall first examine pertinent discussions, particularly of the relation between modernism and postmodernism, and then consider aspects of Bishop's work in relation both to definitions of poetic periods and to other poetic practitioners. My point of departure is Marjorie Perloff's essay “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?,” which summarizes what she sees as the unresolved problem that “came to obsess Modernism: whether poetry should be lyric or collage, meditation or encyclopedia, the still moment or the jagged fragment.” As Perloff points out, the repressed third in the aesthetic conflict of her title is T. S. Eliot, “a bloke whose work both Pound and Stevens had been reading since its inception” (23). Albert Gelpi argues that in modernism we find an “intensification of Romantic irony to the point of rupture,” but also a continuing affirmation of imagination, “though shorn of mystical and idealist claims,” as “still the supreme human faculty of cognition, empowering the artist … to decreate disordered experience into aesthetic order” (“Genealogy” 518-19). From this point of view, in Perloff's terms, the era belongs to Stevens. Building on her idea of postmodernism as embracing a poetics of indeterminacy and tracing a line leading to the Language poets, Perloff argues that among these—for her, definitive—postmodernists, the balance from the 1960s on tipped decisively in favor of Pound.¹

Lynn Keller leans in Gelpi's direction, while enlarging the lineage of modernist poets to include—in addition to Stevens—Moore, Williams, and the “American” Auden in support of her argument that it was the American modernists who stayed home who proved more useful to important American poetic successors (6). The poets she selects as representative of contemporary American practice in the modernist tradition are Bishop, Ashbery, Merrill, and Creeley. Eschewing the narrow limitation of the term “postmodern” to experimental works having an “aggressive emphasis on textuality and on the web of society's semiotic codes,” she prefers to see postmodernism as coincidental with post-World War II writing (8). Keller remarks that unlike the other poets in her study Bishop belongs to no school, and this, I would add, may explain in part why she has been linked with several schools and periods (2). Keller, and others, have described Bishop as a semi-formalist poet, and it may also be that it was Bishop's prosodic in-betweenness that proved useful to successor poets. Keller's inclusion of Bishop in the postwar generation, however, is troubling, in that Bishop was fifteen years or more older than the other poets in her study and was an acknowledged mentor to two, Ashbery and Merrill. Although Bishop's first volume, North & South, was published in 1946, most of the poems, as Bishop was at pains to explain, were written before 1941, when the United States entered the war. Study of her manuscripts and notebooks, moreover, reveals that most of her enduring concerns as a poet had been articulated in one form or another by the 1930s and early 1940s. Bishop may have been slow to publish and slow to gain public recognition, but she became a mature practitioner of her art in the decade following her graduation from college.

James Longenbach attempts to rescue postmodernism from what he sees as overly ideological readings by using the term “in a more plainly historical fashion to describe any poetry that sees itself self-consciously as coming after modernism” (470). This view is confirmed by Antony Easthope and John Thompson, who argue, after the manner of Eliot on the relation of his generation of poets to their precursors, that the modernists are what the postmodernists know. Postmodernism, they write, “has surpassed the shock of the new … if only because, coming two generations after modernism, it must accept that as already part of its own history” (viii). Longenbach points out that Randall Jarrell was “the first person to use the word ‘postmodern’ in a literary context,” in 1947, in his review of Robert Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle, in which he wavered between describing that book as post- or antimodern, but in any event saw it as marking the end of the line of modernism (469, 471).

For Longenbach, the poets Hart Crane, Randall Jarrell, and Elizabeth Bishop are in the purist sense postmodern, in that they “were deeply aware of writing after the full flush of modernist achievement” (470). In discussions of formative influences on Bishop, the neglected figure for Longenbach is once again T. S. Eliot, whom Bishop interviewed at Vassar College during his visit there in 1933. In her essay, “Dimensions for a Novel,” Longenbach sees a desire “to produce something different from her modernist forebears” in her idiosyncratic reading of Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as “a theory of hermeneutic indeterminacy.” Responding to Eliot's notion that the monuments of literary history are “altered by the introduction of the ‘really new’ work of art,” she proposed in parallel that the linear sequence of narrative undergoes a “constant readjustment” as writing proceeds, and that a diagram of this process would look “something like a bramble bush” (Longenbach 474-75). In her essay on Hopkins, written at about the same time, Bishop discusses the way a poet brings down to paper “a moving, changing idea or series of ideas,” and illustrates what she means by inventing the figure of a marksman and his target, both in motion (476). By highlighting these passages in Bishop's early theorizing about writing, Longenbach provocatively takes the very point at which Bishop may seem most vulnerable to dismissal by some postmodernists as a traditionalist of the Eliot school and turns it into a revelation of Bishop as a nascent postmodernist—in the extreme hypertextual vein, at that.

Although I like Longenbach's historical particularity in marking when for American poets the term “postmodernism” was introduced and also when a sense of change was confirmed, by John Berryman, with his remark that “‘some period’” was “‘drawing to a close’” (472), I doubt that all comers will be persuaded that Crane, Jarrell, and Bishop are the purest of postmodernists, within the expansive thicket of figures currently embraced by that term. From the perspective of the radical experimentalism of the Language poets, Charles Bernstein argues that modernism itself should be associated with a recurrent avant-garde and defines it in terms of a discourse that makes a self-conscious break from the discourse of its immediate past.² Accepting the familiar association of modernism with a “crisis of representation” beginning just before the outbreak of the Great War and continuing into the period between the two world wars, Bernstein argues that “postmodern memory” is still recovering from the repressed shock of World War II, in which “the meaning and urgency of unrepresentability took on explosive new force as a political necessity, as the absolute need to reground polis” (200). What among the modernists began as an aesthetic investigation, among the postmodernists became “an act of human reconstruction and reimagining” (200). Postmodernists rejected any “lingering positivist and romantic orientations toward … master systems and the poetic Spirit or Imagination as transcendent,” and instead focused on “particularity, the detail rather than the overview, form understood as eccentric rather than systematic, process more than system, or if system then system that undermines any hegemonic role for itself” (201).

Thus, Bernstein explains the end, one might say, of the heroic age of modern poetry in terms of a critique of ideology, but then he goes one step further to explain the necessity among some postmodern poets of a radical rejection of traditional uses of language as a psychic imperative “to dismantle the grammar of control and the syntax of command” (202). From this perspective, the struggle in the postmodern era lies, in Joseph Conte's words, between “retrogressive New Formalists” and “avant-garde Language poetries.” Conte points out that “[m]any of the poets in both groups were born after 1945” and “had no immediate debt to, or personal contact with, the great modernist poets, most of whom were born in the 1880s” (272). The question of proximity to the high modernists is of some import to the placement of Bishop, who stands between the high modernists and postwar contemporaries. She did have direct contact with high modernist writers, even while she quietly but firmly plotted her difference from them. To get at that connection and difference, I turn now to a brief comparison between Bishop and Wallace Stevens, one of the “major” men she read closely and then edged away from.

In the Canon Aspirin passage of “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” many commentators have agreed with Harold Bloom that Stevens achieves a “heroic” reintegration of the imagination and reality through a refusal to choose between them:

He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choice
Between, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony.

([The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens] 403)³

According to Perloff, for Bloom this choice is “Wordsworthian rather than Blakean, for it insists that the context of fact or nature can be harmonized with the more exuberant context of the poet's apocalyptic desires” (5). When Bishop once described herself as a minor female Wordsworth, she was thinking primarily of the content of her poems, the natural description, but she also can be thought of as repeating the early Wordsworth's “modernist” reaction against the singing birds of late-eighteenth-century poetry in his embrace of the “real language of men,” recollected from his boyhood home at Grasmere.⁴ Like Wordsworth, Bishop yearned for the remembered speech and cadences of her early childhood life in the country, and the rendering of that language in poetry struck her contemporaries, including Lowell and Jarrell, as markedly original and fresh. But it is the psychic impulse behind this leaning that I want to concentrate on here. For Bishop, and perhaps for Wordsworth too, early displacement from home caused an intense yearning for a return, impossible to realize except through art. Bishop's modernist search for her own “usable past,” however, takes place in the aftermath of the heroic, despairing effort of high modernist poets to synthesize a unified poetic culture from the wreckage of civilization. By intellect and education she might have been an inheritor of that civilization, ruined or not, but by reason of sex, sexuality, and temperament she stood apart, at a much more deeply ironic moment than Stevens', and it is her sense of being unmoored (pun partly intended) from home, a guest in every household, and of writing from the margins that now speak to the postmodernism that theorizes decentering and the loss of the transcendental signified.⁵ In “Questions of Travel,” Bishop, like Stevens, addresses the problem of choice, when her archetypal traveler, in querulous self-vindication, takes a notebook and writes:

“Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there … No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?”

([The Complete Poems, 1927-1979; hereafter cited as EBCP] 94)

That “No” is an extra-grammatical eruption, pointing back to a break in logic and structure and to Bishop's incapacity to predicate a home base. If there is no home, there can be no definitive here or there.

There can be memory, though, and nostalgia, and Bishop is, as everyone recognizes, a great poet of childhood recollected. To the extent that she can be aligned with late romantic tendencies in modernist poetry, Bishop—or what she seems to stand for—will be alien to postmodernists bent on valorizing cultural disruption. Consider Charles Bernstein's furious rejection of Helen Vendler, for example, when she writes (in her introduction to The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry) that “The symbolic strength of poetry consists in giving presence, through linguistic signs, to absent realities” (Bernstein 17). In his verse essay “Artifice of Absorption,” Bernstein responds:

First off, one might wonder, why give presence to
“absent realities” & not to absent unrealities,
or why not give absence to (obliterate)
present realities, & so on; but this takes us
too far afield (which is the point).

(41)

He continues,

                                                            Vendler says
she hopes readers will be provoked by some of the
anthologized poems to say—“‘Heavens, I recognize
the place, I know it!’ It is the effect every poet
hopes for.” I would hope
readers might be provoked to say of some poems,
“Hell, I don't recognize the place or the time or
the ‘I’ in this sentence. I don't know it.”

(42)

The touchstone line Vendler quotes is of course from Bishop's poem called “Poem,” in which Bishop's scrutiny of her Nova Scotian uncle's painting breaks off with a leap from artifice to referent in the world, held in memory: “I never knew him. We both knew this place” (EBCP 177). With this movement of mind, Bishop might be said, in Vendler's words, to give presence to an absent reality through recollection, just the sort of “modern” effect Bernstein cites next in his verse essay, when he writes,

                                                            one of the features of
the “modernity” that developed in the West after
1795 was an attempt to “naturalize” artifice
                                                            … by emotionally
necessitating & removing from the foreground
the devices that are an inevitable part of poetic
composition. …

(42-43)

This would also seem to be the rhetorical force of the line from Bishop Vendler selects for admiration, except that “Poem” goes on being about writing a poem, as its title insists, and about the peculiar interactions of life (the natural or historical), memory (the compression and confusion of mental images with the object of the look), and artifice:

                                        I can almost remember the farmer's name.
His barn backed on that meadow. There it is,
titanium white, one dab. The hint of steeple,
filaments of brush-hairs, barely there,
must be the Presbyterian church.

(EBCP 176)

Bishop's persistent reminders of mediating artifice, her reduction of a transcendental, synthesizing “vision” to a coincidence of “looks” she shared with her uncle, and her insistence that life and memory turn into each other—“Which is which?”—keep this poem hovering between the naturalizing tendency—the substitution of an organicist for a rhetorical conception of form, in Bernstein's terms—and the distancing intervention of artifice.

For forty years at least, Bishop held in mind a figure that focused her unresolved inquiry into relations between the natural and the artificial. This figure first appears in a notebook of the 1930s as a title unaccompanied by a text: “GRANDMOTHER'S GLASS EYE: AN ESSAY IN STYLE.” Eventually, the title acquired some pages toward an essay, and then in her 1977 Guggenheim application, Bishop proposed to write a poem called “Grandmother's Glass Eye.” In the draft essay, she writes of her maternal grandmother: “Quite often the glass eye looked heavenward, or off at an angle, while the real eye looked at you.” She then remarks, “The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as [canceled: ‘inevitable’] normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye” (Papers 35.570). This preoccupation of Bishop's also finds its way into her 1948 essay on Marianne Moore, in which she draws a surprising comparison between Moore as a poet and Poe as a prose writer, both of whom, she asserts, “strike a tone of complete truth-telling that is compelling and rare. …” Bishop is on her way toward a justification of Moore's idiosyncratic verse forms—her “mannerisms”—both as developing “some completely ‘natural’ idea” through technical skill and as meeting Poe's requirement that Originality “demands in its attainment less of invention than negation” (“As We Like It” 133-34). (Negation here is connected to the notion derived from Kant of the sublime as the unpresentable [Lyotard 78].) Summing up, with regard to Moore's poems about animals, Bishop writes:

With all its inseparable combinations of the formally fabulous with the factual, and the artificial with the perfectly natural, her animal poetry seduces one to dream of some realm of reciprocity, a true lingua unicornis.

(“As We Like It” 135)

In her belief in truth and her faith in description as the way to the real, Bishop sounds decidedly pre-postmodern, although her notebook meditations reveal an extended concern with how the perceiver may attain to truth—through glimpses allowed by art, as Poe asserted—or through intense scrutiny of particulars, because, as Pascal claimed, the truths available within human experience stand separate from one another.⁶ She remained acutely aware of poetry as an artifice laid over disparate facts and held an almost mystical belief in the capacity of versification in all its artificiality to provide the unifying element that allows truth to be glimpsed. In this regard, though she affirms Poe's notion of Originality as an attainment of the difficult discipline of negativity, she does not hold, as many postmodernists do, that what we call reality is wholly a construct. The originality of successful art, for her, is that it clears away stale constructions so that the real can be seen, if only for a second. That is why “freshness” is one of her highest terms of praise for a writer, as when she thanks the author of The Diary of “Helena Morley” for “the book that has kept her childhood for us, as fresh as paint” (Diary, Foreword xxxiv).

Bishop's sense of poetic artifice, then, differs at the level of epistemology—what can be known—from that which is articulated among postmodern poets, while bearing a family resemblance to their claims about certain effects of poetic practice. Linda Reinfeld remarks that “Language poetry tends to privilege the abnormal over the normal, the marginal over the mainstream, the artificial over the plain” (4). For Bishop, by contrast, the natural and the artificial are maintained in constant tension. Still, despite her “country mouse” downrightness of address, her long-standing meditation on the eye of artifice is of interest and should perhaps prompt some revisiting of the radical precursors of postmodernism among the high modernists and their precursors among the Symbolistes, whom she studied with care. Though she rejected the irrationalism of the surrealists, Bishop paid considerable attention to dream states and introduced perceptual shifts of dreaming into a number of her early poems, including “The Unbeliever,” “Sleeping on the Ceiling,” and “Sleeping Standing Up.” Of more direct pertinence, though, is her 1937 story “The Sea & Its Shore,” whose hero is Edwin Boomer, a prototypical postmodernist. Drunk most of the time and living on the literal margin between land and sea, in a house that “was more like an idea of a house than a real one,” Boomer has taken up the “priest-like task” of clearing the beaches of scrap paper, because “the tempo of modern life is too rapid” and “[o]ur presses turn out too much paper covered with print … for nature to take care of herself” ([The Collected Prose; hereafter cited as Prose 171-72). Eventually, because of his obsessive study of the fragmentary writings he gathered and burned, the world of nature and the world of words became hopelessly confused: “To Boomer's drunken vision the letters appeared to fly from the pages. He raised his lantern and staff and ran waving his arms, headlines and sentences streaming around him, like a man shooing a flock of pigeons” (Prose 175). In this story, attention is directed to language and print at the level of the fable, not, as in much postmodern writing, at the level of the medium of composition itself. Yet Boomer's befuddled musings both enact the retreat from romantic faith in the constructive power of the imagination and foreshadow questions about language and genre that preoccupy postmodern writers. Thinking about authors of stories, Boomer reflects, “he depended on ‘their imagination,’ and was even its slave, but at the same time he thought of it as a kind of disease” (Prose 177-78). Making “no distinction between the bewilderments of prose and those of poetry,” he nightly struggled to make sense of the proliferating fragments of print:

But what did these things mean?

Either because of the insect armies of type so constantly besieging his eyes, or because it was really so, the world, the whole world he saw, came before many years to seem printed, too.

(Prose 178)

Among honored modernist precursors of postmodernist writers, the rising figure is not Ezra Pound but Gertrude Stein, whose work Bishop knew well and about whom she took more notice than has generally been recognized, especially in the time before and leading up to her writing of “The Sea & Its Shore.” In a letter to Moore, in which she mentions working on this story, she says that reading Moore's review of Stein brought her to the point of buying the book, “although I decided quite a while ago that I had bought quite enough, too much, of Miss Stein” (One Art 47). In 1934, when Stein delivered one of her Lectures in America at the New School in New York, Bishop was present in the audience, and tucked away in one of her notebooks of the period are several pages of notes on Stein's lecture, “Portraits and Repetition,” including remarks on the distinction between composition based on resemblance that requires memory and that, like the cinema, in which there is a continuous statement through the production of a series that is “no memory, all movement” (Papers 74.1). Commenting on the importance of Stein for Language poets, Peter Nicholls remarks that what Language poets see as distinctly new in their practice is the repudiation of a “whole tradition of writing about remembered experience of the lyric self, turning attention instead to the ‘tense-less’ condition of language as medium” (121). Most readers, I think, would see Bishop as standing in the tradition of the lyric self writing about remembered experience, and yet one can find in comments and notes a certain persistent tension about predication and linguistic structure, as in her often-quoted comment to Marianne Moore:

But I have that continuous uncomfortable feeling of “things” in the head, like icebergs or rocks or awkwardly placed pieces of furniture. It's as if all the nouns were there but the verbs were lacking—if you know what I mean.

(One Art 94)

She concludes this passage, saying, “But you remember how Mallarmé said that poetry was made of words, not ideas—and sometimes I'm terribly afraid I am approaching, or trying to approach it all, from the wrong track” (One Art 94).⁷ Although hanging onto the romantic faith in the world as idea, Bishop's likening of words to things and her struggle with syntax tug her toward the radical interrogators of language in the Pound and Stein traditions.

While living in Brazil, Bishop worked at a verse-letter to Lowell and Moore, never completed, that articulated her sense of being bogged down in language. In it, endless rain postpones the “view,” and an impassable road prefigures an impasse in writing:

and sometime during the night
the poem I was trying to write
has turned into prepositions:
ins and aboves and upons
what am I trying to do?
Change places in a canoe?
                                        method of composition—. …

(qtd. in Millier 314)

When the emphasis in language shifts from nouns and verbs to prepositions, attention shifts from the order of things and acts in space and time to the motion of continual relationships, as the Canadian poet Erin Mouré has shown.⁸ Ordinarily, Bishop is rightly seen, and saw herself, as a descriptive poet who placed her faith in nouns, yet her sense of displacement, in the world and in language, arose early and remained strong throughout her career. In her story “In Prison,” the unnamed narrator recounts a feeling of being out and of having to construct the object of her desire, a birdcage-like prison. Reflecting on the unsatisfactory incarceration of convicts she had observed, who were released each day to seek employment, she writes, “there must have hung over their lives the perpetual irksomeness of all half-measures, of ‘not knowing where one is at’” (Prose 183). The point, she writes, is that “One must be in; that is the primary condition” (Prose 182).⁹ The quoted colloquialism “not knowing where one is at” permits the preposition to dangle; the italicized terminus “in” determinedly cuts off the “where” or “what.” The narrator's fantasies of prison are insistently mediated through pictures and books (The Enormous Room, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and so on), but her desire is not to attain to a library but to be confined to one dull book,

perhaps the second volume, if the first would familiarize me too well with the terms and purpose of the work. Then I shall be able to experience with a free conscience the pleasure, perverse, I suppose, of interpreting it not at all according to its intent. Because I share with Valéry's M. Teste the “knowledge that our thoughts are reflected back to us, too much so, through expressions made by others. …”

(Prose 187-88)

The narrator closes an ongoing meditation on the difference between Choice and Necessity with a prepositional shift from action to reflex and a verbal self-correction we have come to recognize as a signature of Bishop's style:

“Freedom is knowledge of necessity”; I believe nothing as ardently as I do that. And I assure you that to act in this way is the only logical step for me to take. I mean, of course, to be acted upon in this way is the only logical step for me to take.

(Prose 191)

Bishop does not quite see herself locked into Jameson's prison house of language, but in this fable she edges toward it, aspiring to the condition of in-ness and binding herself to a world of mediated forms.

In a verse-essay based on couplets of six-word lines entitled “The Marginalization of Poetry,” postmodern poet and theorist Bob Perelman attempts a paradoxical rescue of poetry from marginality by attending to its marginality of form:

                                                            But to defend this
(poem) from its own attack, I'll
say that both the flush left
and irregular right margins constantly loom
as significant events, often interrupting what
I thought I was about to
write and making me write something
else entirely. Even though I'm going
back and rewriting, the problem still
reappears every six words. So this,
and every poem, is a marginal
work in a quite literal sense.

(232)

In its self-conscious, punning attention to itself as construct, Perelman's parenthesized poem comments on a poetic tradition it takes exception to, and we can easily see in it criticism of the sort of poetry Bishop composed, in his dismissal of

                                        first person meditations
where the meaning of life becomes
visible after 30 lines.

(237)

Or can we? Here Perelman sounds rather like Bishop herself, at times, in lines like “Oh, must we dream our dreams / and have them, too? / And have we room / for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?” (“Questions of Travel” [EBCP 93]). And in her punning deflation of romantic faith in continuities among subject, world, and poem, in “The Bight,” in which the little white boats wrecked in the last storm lie on their sides “like torn-open, unanswered letters,” and yield to the line “The bight is littered with old correspondences” (EBCP 60). Or in the crazy dis-correspondence between literal objects on a desk and what the perceiving subject makes of them, in “12 O'Clock News,” a prose poem that began in the 1930s and was finally published in Geography III, placed just before “Poem.”

Finally, Bishop's appeal for postmodernists lies in her persistently off-angled vision—or look—at an endlessly problematic world of process rather than arrivals, just going on, like the dredge at the end of “The Bight.” Like her ultimate marginal, the sandpiper, Bishop continues, with one foot in the romantic camp—a student of Blake—and the other on the ever-moving sand, in a world wonderfully detailed but never explained, where “the Atlantic drains / rapidly backwards and downwards”:

The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,
looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

(EBCP 131)

Whereas the visionary Blake professed to see a world in a grain of sand, the best Bishop's obsessed, preoccupied sandpiper can hope for is to see the world as many grains of sand, one after another.

Notes

1. Gelpi disputes Perloff's (and Hugh Kenner's) assertion that the modernists were aiming at a poetics of indeterminacy. Whereas Perloff sets up an opposition between Pound and Stevens, Gelpi sees in both Pound and Stevens the aim to achieve a “coherent splendor.” See his book by that title.

2. Lyotard, too, argues that avant-gardes are recurrent moments of modernity, “perpetually flushing out artifices of presentation which make it possible to subordinate thought to the gaze and to turn it away from the unpresentable.” Declaring that a “work can become modern only if it is first postmodern,” he asserts that postmodernism “is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant” (79).

3. Discussed with reference to Bloom in Perloff (4-5).

4. It was in looking over the poems that ultimately went into A Cold Spring that Bishop remarked, “I find I'm really a minor female Wordsworth—at least, I don't know anyone else who seems to be such a Nature Lover” (One Art 222).

5. Filmmaker and theorist Trinh Minh-ha writes: “Home for the exile in a secular and contingent world is always provisional. The safe ground and secure delimitations of the familiar territory take on different oppressive faces as home can also become prison, while the prison is not a prison when willing slaves either prefer not to recognize, or remain blind to the false humanity and disguised barbarity that allow them to live with the illusion of a reassuring order.” She continues, “for those who remain strangers in their homeland and foreigners in their new homes, feeling repeatedly out of place within every familiar world, it is vital to question settlement, as well as to make it easier for the diversely unsettled ones to bear the anxieties of unwonted seclusion. Home and language in such a context never become nature” (193-94). These remarks shed light both on the present discussion of Bishop's “Questions of Travel” and on her story “In Prison,” discussed below.

6. For further discussion of Bishop's interest in Pascal and Poe, see my essay “Off-Beat Claves, Oblique Realities: The Key West Notebooks of Elizabeth Bishop” (205-06).

7. The persistent reference to Mallarmé among poets who seem to tend in opposing directions suggests that the conception of lyric poetry has not shifted greatly through the periodic changes implied by romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism. As Perloff observes, “Mallarmé, for example, whose Symbolist poetics is at the very heart of Modernism, shares the Romantic belief that poetry is lyric, and that lyric is the expression of what Stevens was to call the ‘Supreme Fiction’ or the ‘First Idea’” (178). Pound distinguishes poetry from drama: “whereas the medium of poetry is WORDS, the medium of drama is people moving about on a stage and using words” (46). In an interview for the Talisman volume on Postmodern Poetry, Rosmarie Waldrop remarks, “I think really what any good poet does is listening to the words and letting them take over and take us by the hand, taking us in unforeseen directions, stretching our original ideas, which can always stand to be stretched.” Her interlocutor then says, “Which is the reason wisdom isn't the best guide,” to which Waldrop replies, “for poets—oh no, not at all. Remember that famous exchange when Degas said to Mallarmé, It's funny, I have lots of ideas. Why can't I write poems? And Mallarmé said, Well, poems aren't made with ideas; they're made with words” (142-43).

8. Mouré writes of her ambition: “To try to move the force in language from the noun/verb centre. To de/centralize the force inside the utterance from the noun/verb, say, to the preposition. Even for a moment. To break the vertical hold. To empower the preposition to signify and utter motion, the motion of the utterance, and thereby Name.” She continues, “If the preposition can disturb the force of the utterance and phrase: this changes reading. Like the eye reads the TV screen: the screen's multiplicity of repetition creates the image for us, the image not On the screen but embedded IN the repetitions. The THING we are seeing is a MOTION. The Motion before the Name. The image/thing is not object, but act. Not act, but act act act—a continual relation” (94-95). Cf. Stein on cinema, in “Repetition and Portraits,” a passage on which Bishop took notes (Stein 176).

9. Discussing Bishop's efforts to write about her mother's madness and death, Sandra Barry cites a line from Bishop's “Reminiscences of Great Village,” an unpublished precursor to her story “In the Village,” written in the mid-1930s, and gives its curious prepositional surplus a dire implication. Pointing out that Bishop “remained aware of her mother until Gertrude's death on 29 May 1934,” Barry argues that this “explains the apparently anachronic statement in the ‘Reminiscences’: ‘It was May she went away in’” (36).

Works Cited

Barry, Sandra. “Shipwrecks of the Soul: Elizabeth Bishop's Reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins.” Dalhousie Review 74.1 (Spring 1994): 25-50.

Bernstein, Charles. A Poetics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Bishop, Elizabeth. “As We Like It.” Quarterly Review of Literature 4.2 (1948): 129-35.

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