“An Un-Romantic American,” in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1988, pp. 73-92.

[In the following essay, Boland argues that Bishop is “the one un-Romantic American poet of her generation.”]

1

American poetry was a rare commodity in the Dublin bookshops of the sixties and seventies. It could turn up, unpredictably and at random, slanted in with books of British verse and Yugoslavian translation, so that the mode of its appearance had an adverse effect on the nature of its readership. Not surprisingly perhaps, my first encounter with Elizabeth Bishop's work was not in a bookshop at all. I came across her poem “The Moose” in an anthology of American verse I had been sent for review. I read the first stanza and read it again. I read the second and marked the place. Later that night, with the children in their cots and the house quiet, I began to read it again.

A Dublin summer night in the suburbs is all dampness and growth. Eleven o'clock marks a turning point: it divides evening from night, the end of one day from the genesis of the next. Television sets are turned off. Cars are driven into garages with an odd, underwater echo. By midnight the only break in the silence is the young dog a few gardens away who starts up at any noise, like a badly rigged alarm.

This sort of night was second nature to me. Every shift and sight in it had a complex familiarity. If the reading of poetry involves, to paraphrase Keats, “a greeting of the spirit,” it may also necessitate a closing of the circuit. As I read Elizabeth Bishop's poem, this night I knew began to give way to the quicker, more magical dark of hers. As I followed the rhythmic slides of the short stanzas, with their skids and recoveries, my sense of place yielded to hers. The turning of mortice locks and the breathing of children became a terrain of “neat, clapboard churches” and the poplars stirring became the “hairy, scratchy, splintery” dark of the New Brunswick woods. The Gulfstream Irish night turned to the “shifting, salty, thin” fog near Bass River. And I was lost in and to the poem.

On the face of it, any effective poem should work these alchemies and transpositions. But few enough, in reality, provide the wonderful quicksand of Elizabeth Bishop's best work. And still fewer can convey her distinctive poise of danger and craftsmanship. The feeling she expresses, of perceiving a world she cannot control, is a radical source of her vision. Her ability, at the same time, to balance such perceptions in a finished work of art is central to her achievement. “The greatest pleasure I know,” said Charles Lamb, “is to do a good action by stealth and have it found out by accident.” Bishop's poems may be fragrant with these stealths and discoveries; they also sustain and refresh with the risks they have taken.

This sense of risk stems, to a great extent, from her perspective within the poem. At times, as in “In the Waiting Room,” she seems uncertain, and unwilling to be certain, of where her own consciousness ends and the observed world begins:

But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.

Whatever this is, it is not the statement of a Romantic poet. The Romantic poet goes about things differently. He—I use the pronoun for convenience—is never likely to lose track of the boundaries and divisions of his own world, and for the best of all possible reasons: because, in most instances, he has invented it. The mossy stone of Thoor Ballylee, the outlines of Tintern Abbey, the graphite shine of Brooklyn Bridge—these are not, as we read of them, volatile or shifting jetsam of an outside world. They are fragments of an inner universe, securely anchored in an inner vision.

Elizabeth Bishop, on the other hand, is the one un-Romantic American poet of her generation, whose expressive and exclusive imaginative powers refer least to that script handed to the poet by the romantic movement, in both its American and English forms. There is a quickening, a sense of adventure, in poems such as “In the Waiting Room” and “The Moose” when she visibly departs from that script. Her improvisations and departures are wonderfully clear and individual and fresh. Defining the script is a more difficult matter.

Romanticism has been for so long a mainstay of the Academy that it is difficult to remember it must also be a series of subtle and urgent instructions—or, at the very least, suggestions—which the poet internalizes in his or her time. In other words, if Romanticism is anything at all, and long before it becomes a cluster of footnotes and indexes, it must be a living agenda, a sense of complex pressures passing from hand to mouth, from generation to generation of poets. These pressures can only be a living presence in the loneliness of the study or workroom. They must be vivid possibilities in the choice of the next line or the appropriate word. They must not have the cold symmetry of ideas but the warmth and obstinacy of reality.

The trouble is, when considering this kind of living continuum, that it is difficult to argue that Romanticism could be such a single and clear force. After all, Wordsworth and Shelley diverge from Byron, and Keats differed from them all in his approach. Even outside of this, there are wide differences. M. H. Abrams has spoken of Keats, for instance, as “the first great poet to exhibit that peculiarly modern malady—a conscious and persistent conflict between the requirements of social responsibility and aesthetic detachment.” This, according to Richard Wilbur, was not something which affected Edgar Allan Poe; quite the contrary, in fact: “Poe conceived of God as a poet,” writes Wilbur. “The universe, therefore, was an artistic creation, a poem composed by God.” Nothing could be further apart than the English and American poets' views: the one canvassing the claims of conscience, the other probing the limits of aestheticism. Yet both are Romantics. Both have gone some way to giving meaning to the word. Between these two polarities can there be a common ground? Is there, in fact, a script lucid enough for a poet like Elizabeth Bishop to depart from a century later?

I think there is. Romanticism, again according to Abrams, involves “a radical shift to the artist in the alignment of aesthetic thinking.” This shift was accompanied by the growth of an inner self, perhaps the most enduring bequest of Romanticism. As one critic has remarked: “Before Wordsworth poetry had a subject. After Wordsworth, its prevalent subject was the poet's own subjectivity.” This emphasis—on an inner self, on a world perceived through it—is what has come down to poets as a complex and tormented legacy. At some point such a legacy must become a burden. Obviously the positive aspects consist in new freedoms, continuing adventures of the spirit. But in this century the negative aspects have become more visible: and chiefly, the way the outward world can be re-evaluated and then devalued by the potent and sometimes ominous insistence of an inner perception.

It is more difficult to point out the absence of the Romantic emphasis than its presence. Yet I see such absences in Elizabeth Bishop's work. One of the compelling evidences of it is her refusal to exercise the privileges and powers of the Romantic mechanism. She never suggests that her fishhouses and hymn-loving seals, her Nova Scotia kitchens and Tantramar marshes depend on her. She never intimates to us, as Yeats might in “The Wild Swans at Coole” or Byron in “Childe Harold,” that these objects will vanish without her intervention. Her earth is not represented as a dramatized fragment of her consciousness. Instead, she celebrates the separateness, the awesome detachment of the exterior universe. Whatever I do, her poem whispers, The Bight will continue—“awful but cheerful.” Even temperamentally, she seems averse to the whole concept of the poet at the heart of Romantic poetry: the controlling and shaping spirit. Something in her is appalled by such a posture: “No matter how modest you think you feel,” she has said in The Paris Review, “or how minor you think you are there must be an awful core of ego somewhere for you to set yourself up to write poetry.”

I have no doubt that the sweet, bleak aftermath of her poems in the memory comes from her courage in confronting the natural world, and from her suggestion that the powers of poetry may reveal it but not control it. But there is more substantive evidence than this of the individuality of her posture among a generation of Romantic American poets, and it occurs in her technical approach, most especially in her use of time. For Bishop, time conveys the exciting separateness of her world. A Fish. A Moose. Coastal Waters. These things she divides from her, and makes plain their division, by a beautiful chronicle of their aloneness and hers. We cannot meet, she says; but we can learn from our separation:

I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

(from “At the Fishhouses”)

The sense of time here is entirely characteristic, yet so subtle it could be overlooked as one of the agents of her achievement. This is not the time which Lowell employs as he watches the skunks march up Main Street nor that which Hart Crane describes in the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge. It is certainly not Romantic time. In this poem she does not derive a temporal state from a sense of crisis; instead, she allows it to emerge from the thing she is describing. The piece itself is evidence of that. The language of the poem is shaped and driven by the emblematic movement of the element it describes: a dark, swaying, cold force of water which moves, as the passage gathers force, from emblem to symbol. The repetition of “same” twice in one line; the use of “stones” three times in the following three lines; the musical transitions from the aching wrist to aching bones, to the images of the burning hand and water transmuted into fire—all these are built into an incantatory sense of movement which mirrors the time evoked in the poem.

Yet if Elizabeth Bishop is not a Romantic poet, she is certainly a lyric poet. There is self-discovery at the heart of her work, however occluded. She does not engineer this self-discovery, however, as the Romantic poet does, by drawing time into the lyric moment. In a poem like “Skunk Hour,” by Robert Lowell, the momentum of the language and music is toward self-confrontation. The time with which the poem opens—details of autumn in New England, of a shop window being brightened, of the small progresses of life—gives way after a few stanzas to the dark lyric moment which stops everything else in the poem:

One dark night
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull
where the graveyard shelves on the town …
My mind's not right.

This is lyric time in the hands of a Romantic poet. Lowell moves the poem, with force and grace, toward the climax, when the skunks move down Main Street, searching “in the moonlight for a bite to eat.” All time becomes this moment in the poem, which reveals and is shaped by the inner world of crisis that is the motif of the piece.

Elizabeth Bishop does something quite different. She uses narrative time in a lyric context. Her purposes are self-discovering and self-revealing. No one can read “In the Waiting Room” or “Sestina” and doubt it. But she does not practice what the Romantic poet so often does. She will not draw a perception of time from inward crisis and use that projection to quicken the exterior world. Instead, she allows her experience of externals to evolve and shape time in the poem:

—For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
          aren't waterfalls yet,
          in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
          they probably will be.

(from “Questions of Travel”)

The result of this is that her poems are characteristically grand, slow, and quiet. They have a distinctive pace, as if the poet were saying, literally, let us take time. But narrative time in the hands of a poet with a lyric purpose can also be deceptive. It can begin, as “At the Fishhouses” does, with detail and precision. Then through music, a quickening of impact and more detail, it can build to a point where it is narrating as much inward power as outward perception.

After that summer night, I did what I could to discover more about Elizabeth Bishop's work. I bought her books, studied her poems, tried to unravel the secrets of her prose. None of this was as concerted or conscious as it looks with hindsight. It was gradual and random; yet also, once I had read “The Moose,” inevitable. It was also difficult. I found it hard to understand the sources of her vision and the necessity for her statement. The process of rapport seemed more flawed and disrupted than with any other poet I had been drawn to. But there were reasons.

2

No poet enters the life of another, whatever the disruptions of time and distance, through words alone. Poets imagine one another. They think and think until their own sense of the narrow streets of Florence explains the light and passion of the Paradiso. Or the Welsh marches and the chill of Northwest England illuminates “Pearl.” They imagine the cattle train bringing Mandelstam to Smirsk, and the cold library in London in which Yeats found it difficult to replace the heavy volumes on the shelf. It is hardly a pure critical process. All the same, I feel sure it is in these fires of rapport that poets have found and loved one another for a millennium.

For all that, I have the greatest difficulty in reconstructing Elizabeth Bishop's life. Part of this may be circumstantial. To all intents and purposes—and for decades—Ireland was shut off from the American poetic experience. Yeats has described how, as a young poet, he went from place to place with Leaves of Grass in his pocket. But he is the exception. In a general sense, the temperate climate in which another poetry could thrive and be understood was missing. Political factors offer some reasons for this. Ireland's neutrality in the Second World War made a great deal of foreign influences of all kind simply inaccessible. Books were just a fraction of it. The difficulties of travel have always provided another set of reasons. Perhaps, on a less circumstantial level, the post-colonial aftermath made Irish poets often more interested in, and anxious about, British poetry than American.

In the sixties all this began to change. American poetry—through journals, articles, imported books—began to leak and drip into Ireland. It was an uncertain and frustrating process. A student then at Trinity College, Dublin, I wrote poetry and spent more time than I should have discussing poetry with other student poets. It was an exciting moment. I listened eagerly to discussions of American poetry, and after a while, I began to know the names. Wilbur was talked about—this was the mid-sixties. Lowell's Life Studies was not yet widely known, but his “Quaker Graveyard” was in several British anthologies. (“Hashed-up Melville,” one young poet said to me, rather crossly, when I admired it tentatively.) Sylvia Plath was already dead—this was 1964—and much discussed. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and Heart's Needle were talked about as being opposite ends of a virtuoso scale. Elizabeth Bishop was never mentioned.

There are explanations for this, and they amount to more than the vagaries of editors of anthologies. To this day, I suspect that it is the American poets most assimilable to the Yeatsian tradition who most readily find a hearing in Ireland. I may well be wrong. Nevertheless, poets like Roethke, Lowell, Berryman, even Adrienne Rich, look familiar to an Irish audience: they occupy the center of their work. They mediate their world through a controlled and controlling self. However alien their technical freedoms—and I would not want to minimize this—they nevertheless raise recognizable and therefore consoling problems. They pose questions as to whether the self in their poems is invented or created, and force the reader to ask how much of the material is manipulated by being mediated through such a self. These are ethical and aesthetic questions. We have been here before, whispers the Irish reader. We know this: this is poetry. But Elizabeth Bishop's work falls outside the compass of such questions and answers. It is estranged from the patterns and responses of post-Yeatsian Romantic poetry. I would not say this has distanced her from her Irish readers in any final way. But it has delayed their discovery of her work. She is still far less known in this country—and for a shorter time—than her contemporaries. But that neglect is changing.

Since a critique of her work was so lacking when I was a young poet, I tended to find her in the fits and starts I have described above. Being unsure how to place her, I had to rely on illicit critical methods to understand her: on snatches of comparison, modes of rapport which involved me trawling through my experience to understand hers. If, therefore, in this part of my argument, I seem to be canvassing her meaning as an American poet in terms of my intuitions of Irishness, it is because this was my first true access to her work.

Her birth, for instance, in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1911, is a world away from anything I knew. I was born in the Dublin of the forties. I was the youngest of a family of five. She lost her father when she was eight months old. More tragically, her mother, Gertrude Bulmer Bishop, was institutionalized when her daughter was five. The scar tissue of these events is obvious in Elizabeth Bishop's work. But it is difficult to isolate moments when the full weight of these early losses becomes apparent; few poems speak directly to or about these matters. One of them, which opens into a detailed world of grief, is the beautiful poem “Sestina”:

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac
on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It seems worth pointing out, though perhaps not laboring, that the most revealing statements of grief Elizabeth Bishop makes are also the most ritualized. Elsewhere in her work, grief may well be implied in the distances and astringencies of theme and tone. But this is only an implication. In “Sestina” and “One Art,” however, it is obvious that she entrusted some of her deepest implications of loss to two of the most intricate game forms in poetry.

“Sestina” moves by a sequence of surreal images—the teakettle, the almanac, the stove—toward a conclusion in which the reader can see that the form is an elaborate archive for an almost formless desolation. Here is the child in the kitchen; here is the old grandmother who cannot fill the role of the mother; here are the details of a childhood full of menace. In the end, the musical constraint which the sestina puts on the theme is a forceful reminder of the constraints which Elizabeth Bishop put on private revelation and sorrow.

Another instance of this is “One Art,” a villanelle which was published in Geography III. There are differences, however, between the two poems, and they illustrate technical and imaginative differences in Bishop's approach at different times. “Sestina” is packed with desolate halftones, dropped hints, and the incantatory shadows of nursery rhymes. It manages to convey, at one and the same time, that there is sorrow, yes, and loss, yes, but that they are imperfectly understood. Therefore the poem operates at two different levels. Within it a terrible sorrow is happening. But the teakettle keeps boiling, the cup is full of tea, the stove is warm. Only we, outside the poem, get the full meaning of it all.

“One Art” is quite different. It makes full use of the responsibilities of the villanelle: of the potential of that form to be both ceremonial and anarchic, to convey the deepest emotion in the most adroit manner. The tone, which is both casual and direct, is deliberately worked against the form, as it is not in “Sestina.” Once again, Bishop shows that she is best able to display feeling when she can constrain it most:

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

In 1934, Elizabeth Bishop entered Vassar. Here, surely, as a young woman poet starting out her apprenticeship in a university context, it should be possible to connect with her. But, again, there are difficulties, a lack of correspondence. America in the thirties is a world away from Dublin in the sixties. The poetic traditions are quite dissimilar. In her marvelous essay about Marianne Moore, “Efforts of Affection,” Elizabeth Bishop discusses the older poet as precedent and exemplar. By the time she came to meet her, “I had already,” she says, “read every poem of Miss Moore's I could find.”

When I started to write, Ireland offered no such precedent. There were no Irish women poets to meet—as Elizabeth Bishop met Marianne Moore—on the bench at the right of the door leading to the reading room of the New York Public Library. There were no visits to a Brooklyn apartment with waist-high bookcases and carpenter's tools hanging by the kitchen door. There was nobody I knew—still less a distinguished poet—who would take Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps to the basement and burn it with due ceremony. Their relationship was certainly eccentric, but, in poetic terms, never less than enviable. Marianne Moore gave Elizabeth Bishop encouragement and example. Elizabeth Bishop gave Marianne Moore snakes: “a beautiful specimen of the deadly coral snake with inch-wide rose-red and black stripes separated by narrow white stripes, a bright new snake coiled in liquid in a squat glass bottle.” It is easy enough to parody the slightly starchy protocol of such a friendship. Elizabeth Bishop does it herself, at moments, in “Efforts of Affection.” There can be no doubt, however, that, as literary nurture, it was totally adequate.

There are no parallels to this in anything I knew as a young poet, in or out of university. When I began writing poetry, the Irish poetic tradition had been for more than a hundred years almost exclusively male. Images of nationhood in such poetry were often feminized and simplified. Cathleen ni Houlihan. Dark Rosaleen. The Poor Old Woman. These potent mixtures of national emblem and feminine stereotype stood between me and any immediate and easy engagement with the poetic tradition I inherited. It would take me years to realize that somewhere, behind these images, was the complex and important truth of Irishness and womanhood.

Yet I was, if I had only known it, fortunate. At times, and more and more as the years went on, I felt the absence of a female poetic precedent. Nevertheless, the objective fact remained that I was working within the literary tradition of a defeated people. Once again, though I would be slow to realize it, this was a tradition rich in instruction. It would lead me to make a close association between ethical and aesthetic concerns. It would persuade me of a necessary connection between art and human survival. Above all, it offered metaphors for private defeats and oppressions more valuable than any human precedent could be.

It also brought me to Elizabeth Bishop. On the face of it, this may seem contradictory. After all, American literature more often than not canvasses the relation of its writers to a nation which has been established by history and made visible by event. The Irish experience is quite different. The Irish nation, more often than not, is occluded by humiliations and setbacks. Its writers have had to invent, to improvise, to experiment. Joyce spoke of the “uncreated” awareness of his race; Yeats of the “indomitable Irishry.” Both were aware that they were negotiating an experience of defeat into one of articulation and recovery.

American writers have had a quite different point of departure. When Lowell writes of the Union Dead, or Frost asserts “the land was ours before we were the land's,” there is some sense—even allowing for the internal exile of the writer—of historical consensus.

Elizabeth Bishop does not have the same historical or national sense as some of her contemporaries or predecessors. I cannot see her writing a line like “the pure products of America go crazy,” as Williams did. Her terms of reference are often geographical. She frequently uses place as an index of loss and almost never as a measure of identity. The American poets of her generation who addressed the national experience did so in terms of private and public identity. She remained wryly outside this. “I am green with envy of your kind of assurance,” she wrote to Robert Lowell, yet she remained in her own private, imaginative territory. She could infer, and did, that Lowell, by invoking family names, was able to summon up the American experience, but she knew she was compelled to explore a more private and obsessive area. Her obsession, conveyed in her beauties of weather, her cool distances of tone, her haunting rhythms, is with the inability to belong rather than the need to.

Irish literature is primarily the record of a defeated people. The register of feeling it conveys, from fantasy to desolation, is intimately associated with the insults of circumstance the country has sustained. If history is, as Napoleon said, “the agreed lie,” then Irish writers have learned to look with skepticism and a little envy at the counterfeiters. They have had, after all, no hand in the lie. They can only wrench their truths from somewhere in its vicinity.

Over the years I had grown familiar with the archive of feeling stored in such a literature. I could recognize the fantasy and the grief and value them. As well as that, I valued something which Irish literature was also rich in: the sense of exile. That sense, in Irish literature, was the response by some of the best writers, such as Joyce and Beckett, to the intolerable weight of the past and a present sense of the irrecoverable. I felt it was not stretching things to observe and record that same feeling of exile in Elizabeth Bishop's best work, and to ascribe it to the same cause.

When I think of her fishhouses, her cold springs, and the way she details the color of a sky or the shiver of an iris, I see in those images an index of her exile. She relates to them with the precision and surprise of the true traveler, the inner émigré, who sees them for the first time and may not see them again. Eliot said of Baudelaire: “It is not merely in the use of imagery of common life, not merely in the use of imagery of the sordid life of a great metropolis, but in the elevation of such images to the first intensity—presenting it as it is and yet making it represent much more than itself—that Baudelaire created a mode of expression and release for other men.”

Elizabeth Bishop's best poetry is full of images of the first intensity. But such images—although essential if the poem is to survive—cannot exist alone. If they exist alone they remain part of a fractured world, whose lights they may catch but never properly refract. To operate as they should, they must be liberated by an act of poetic coherence. This differs from poet to poet. In Larkin and Yeats the coherence often seems to me rhythmical. Certainly Yeats relied on metrical structures for “the ice and salt” which he thought were the “best packing” for good poetry. In Plath the coherence, when it is there, is an energy of language as much as anything else. In Elizabeth Bishop it is almost always tonal.

3

Poetic tone is more than the speaking voice in which the poem happens; much more. Its roots go deep into the history and sociology of the craft. I imagine that when the early poet/prophets chanted their songs of harvest, or celebrated a reprieve from drought, it was their tone, as much as anything else, that made their audience listen. Do not doubt us, that music would have said: we know the secrets of the tribe. Even today, for a poet, tone is not a matter of the aesthetic of any one poem. It grows more surely, and more painfully, from the ethics of the art. Its origins must always be in a suffered world rather than a conscious craft. The priest/poets drew their authority from the fear they shared with their listeners: of death, of pestilence, of abandonment by their gods. The modern poet holds only human suffering in common with his audience. He draws his authority from that. Or loses it because of that.

By this reckoning, tone has less to do with the expression of a poet's experience—though, of course, that is part of it—than with the impression that experience first made on him or her. In this sense, it is especially revealing as the mirror of a poet's choices. It clarifies values. It establishes a distance between the poet and his material which, in turn, is deflected into the distance between the poem and the reader.

Elizabeth Bishop understood the uses of poetic tone. Her modulation of voice can seem surprising and even, at times, inappropriately daring. But this is all part of the fresh approach she took, a sort of demotic gambling. Consider “At the Fishhouses.” It is a longish poem, an instance of where she employs narrative time to slow down the lyric crescendo. The first lines of the final section are these:

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals …

This, you say to yourself, is serious music. It portends the ambitious theme of the poem: an outward element—this almost intolerable water—will be shown, before the poem finishes, to correspond to the cold interiors of human knowledge. And the life of feeling and sense—which is the chief concern of the poem—flinches from both the water and the cold truths it suggests. And now, suddenly, as you read, the emphasis is dispelled:

                    One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.

What on earth is this? you say. Or out of it, for that matter? What is the creature of a whimsical bedtime story doing popping up—quite literally—at the very center of a metaphysical tableau? For a wild moment or two, you do not expect the poem to recover its momentum. But it does. Completely. The seal disappears and the music continues:

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water … Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.

By the end of the poem, it is obvious that the digression has been an essential strengthening of the final abstraction. What is also obvious is that the cement of the whole piece has been the tone. Throughout the poem, it has remained a register of Bishop's confidence in the experience she is unfolding. When the seal enters the poem, and unsettles us, the tone steadies us. It says, No, wait: this cerebral seascape will grow more poignant and real only when you see how absurd it is to try and humanize its creatures.

In her essay on Bishop, in Part of Nature, Part of Us, Helen Vendler has commented on “one of Bishop's most characteristic forms of expression. When she is not actually representing herself as a child she is, often, sounding like one.” There is a great deal of truth in this. Poems such as “Sestina” and “In the Waiting Room” and “Questions of Travel” are certainly informed by the wounding and wounded radicalism of a child's understanding. In the context, her poetic tone shows itself to be, also, the sophisticated outcome of an artistic choice. If she sees as a child and sounds like a child—and she often does—it is with the eyes and the voice of a violated child, which, in a spiritual sense, she was. Her poetic tone, however, reveals an adult resolution to compose both naïveté and violation in energies of language which are constructive and redemptive:

A cold spring:
the violet was flawed on the lawn.
For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their characteristics.
Finally a grave green dust
settled over your big and aimless hills.
One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,
on the side of one a calf was born.
The mother stopped lowing
and took a long time eating the after-birth,
a wretched flag,
but the calf got up promptly
and seemed inclined to feel gay.

(from “A Cold Spring”)

To her contemporaries, especially Lowell and Jarrell, Bishop's tone was one of the immediate pleasures of her work. When Jarrell calls her poems “quiet, truthful, sad, funny,” he is referring at least in part to the tone in which they happen. But the tone is more than that. It represents and heralds an achievement which occurred at great cost. The poet Robert Pinsky touches on this in his essay “The Idiom of the Self.” He infers the dangers of simply regarding her tone as a colloquial melody and her poetry as a painterly triumph.

“I don't know any other poet,” he writes, “who has treated the contest between the individual single consciousness and the world not itself with such depth and patient precision. This special subject or approach seems to have to do with a ferocity of quickening impulse and a surface of enormous social control. It is ironic that Bishop is often praised, sometimes faintly, for having a loving eye toward the physical world; it is a matter of her mind, not her eye and the process is equally as embattled or resistant as it is loving.”

Those tensions, between surrender and resistance, observation and vision, are poised in her tone. There can be, in certain poets, a disparity between voice and tone; an irritating inflation of the voice in the tone or an equally unsettling diminution of the voice by the tone. These are always central flaws. They may not be bad faith, but they are certainly more than technical errors. They imply a loss of nerve, an uncertainty of poetic conviction. There is a story told of a folksinger in an Irish kitchen, a hundred years ago, who was asked to sing an Irish tune with the words translated into English. “I will do it,” she answered, “but the tune and the words will be like a man and his wife quarreling.” The same effect can happen in a poetry where tone and voice separate. In Elizabeth Bishop they are uncannily at one. An example must be the wonderful moment in her poem “The Moose” when the animal looms up in the woods. The voice in the stanzas is profoundly serious: this is an epiphany, a magical incarnation of femininity and instinct. We never doubt that. The reason we do not is that we receive it through a tone so perfectly judged to the moment, wry, wondering, and at peace:

Now, it's all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
—Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.
A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.
Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
“Perfectly harmless. …”

4

I came to Elizabeth Bishop's work as an Irish poet; an Irish woman poet, at that. I have written of my discovery—and my appreciation—of her in these terms. I have stayed with this portraiture, allowing huge blanks to build on the canvas—even around the features—because I think it may reveal something of the complex assumptions which a poet from one country brings to the work of a poet from another.

Since it took me years—and a great many revisions of perspective—before I could connect my Irishness with my poetry and my womanhood, I have been drawn, in this context, to a final question. In what sense is Elizabeth Bishop to be considered an American poet? The answer is: Obliquely. Certainly her work adds definition and texture to the tradition of American poetry. More importantly, I feel, she defines her country—as so many good Irish writers do—by her absence from it. Other skies, other terrains, faraway distances fill her work. She knew that she commented from the edges, from the margins. She knew, in short, that she was an American poet but not a national poet. In her letter to Robert Lowell, written after reading Life Studies, she treats of this with wry acceptance:

And here I must confess (and I imagine most of your contemporaries would confess the same thing) that I am green with envy of your kind of assurance. I feel I could write in as much detail of my Uncle Artie, say—but what would be the significance? Nothing at all. He became a drunkard, fought with his wife and spent most of his time fishing, and was ignorant as sin. It is sad; slightly more interesting than having an uncle practising law in Schenectady maybe, but that's about all. Whereas all you have to do is put down the names! And the fact that it seems significant, illustrative, American, etc., gives you, I think, the confidence you display about tackling any idea or theme, seriously, in both writing and conversation. In some ways you are the luckiest poet I know!

Poetic luck can change. Traditions and heritages have a way of altering, and considerably, with hindsight. Writers who exist on the margins of their epoch, on the edges of public assumptions, can—with the passage of time—move to the center of their nation's consciousness and inheritance. Irish writing is full of examples of this. By now we are nearly used to the phenomenon that certain writers—Beckett and Joyce are our texts—can only find their country by leaving it.

Elizabeth Bishop was admired by her friends and contemporaries. She enjoyed critical acclaim. I am still surprised, however, by how many commentaries—of the sixties and seventies—mention her with respect but as an afterthought. In this piece I have canvassed two of her poetic tendencies—her un-Romanticism and her diffidence in the face of American identity—which placed her outside the turbulence and camaraderie of her remarkable generation of American poets. Her diffidence should not, however, be represented negatively. If she hesitated in her discourse with an American experience which Williams, Lowell, Berryman—in “Mistress Bradstreet”—and Jarrell laid claim to, it was because she was involved in the delicate and important estrangements which, in the end, may shed as much if not more light on that American experience. She was an exile from any clear or immediate sense of identity. In interviews she spoke of herself as feeling “like a guest.” These are qualities which, when translated into the courage and variety of her poetry, become emblematic of the deepest human experience.

There is hardly anything so elusive as the way in which a poetic inheritance is sifted and rearranged from generation to generation. Any glance at a pile of old anthologies will show how pitiless each generation is in deciding which poets will console and refresh it. From year to year, the sifting goes on, almost invisibly. Poems are read in lonely rooms, in solitary humors, by people to whom the love of poetry is a do-or-die part of their lives. The poem and the reader enter into a mysterious transaction, composed of time and memory and obsession. The mystery of it resides in the fact that—if it is a good poem, or even a great one—the mortal reader will assist it to live on.

I find it immensely poignant that, even at this moment, Elizabeth Bishop, who would not make the American experience her private myth, is being included—with justifiable celebration—in the American canon. It must be clear to anyone who has read her work closely that the complexity of her estrangement will be, from now on, a new part of the myth. Ironically, in her failure to possess it, she has added to it.