“The Subtraction of Emotion in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop,” in The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 48-61.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?

With these lines from “In the Waiting Room,” Elizabeth Bishop describes an event that occurred at the dentist's office in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 5, 1918. Her Aunt Consuelo emits an “oh! of pain” from the dentist's chair in an adjoining room, a cry in which the seven-year-old girl instantly and spontaneously joins. The young girl's cry connects with many things in the poem: the photographs from the National Geographic that she is inspecting, pictures of a “dead man slung on a pole,” “Babies with pointed heads,” “black, naked women with necks / wound round and round with wire” and whose breasts are “horrifying.” The poem informs us too that the “War was on.” And although the poem does not directly treat these things, Elizabeth is with Aunt Consuelo (in real life Aunt Florence) because she has no father, dead when she was eight months old; no mother, committed two years earlier to a mental hospital never again to be seen by her daughter; no siblings. She has just completed three years of living with her maternal grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia, and has now been taken in by the Bishop side of the family in Massachusetts.

In this extraordinary passage—there is none other like it in the collected poems—the poet calls herself by name in a moment of second birth, as “an Elizabeth,” but also “one of them”—that whole surrounding world of displacement, violence, and pain into which she has so uncompromisingly been thrust. The moment is a coming of age, but without any of the social ballasts required for a seven-year-old child, however precocious. And to what is she coming of age? Adulthood. Womanhood. Sexuality. The vocation of a poet. There is evidence of all these things in the poem, the composite of things that constitute “an Elizabeth.”

The poem itself was written and published fifty-three years after the event—it is, in fact, one of her last poems. In the interim, there had been the years at Vassar, when she had ripened as a poet and first met Marianne Moore; a year in New York; three years, more or less, traveling in Europe; nine years in Key West, Florida, and a brief time residing in Mexico; an introduction to Robert Lowell by Randall Jarrell and the beginning of that remarkable friendship. And then beginning in 1951, eighteen years living in Brazil—Rio, Petrópolis, Ouro Prêto—with the Brazilian woman she loved quietly and faithfully, Lota de Macedo Soares, until Lota's death by suicide in 1967—one more domestic tragedy that further stranded her rootless and emotionally fragile existence. The last decade of her life was then spent teaching part-time at Harvard.

In writing “In the Waiting Room,” Bishop is of course aware of all these subsequent events, though they are not recalled in the poem itself. Indeed, at seven, there had already been a lifetime of tragedies. To speak of Elizabeth Bishop is therefore to speak of a woman, an orphan, a perpetual immigrant, a lesbian, and of course an artist.

Throughout the poem the young Elizabeth, though she struggles “to stop / the sensation of falling off / the round, turning world,” denies all self-pity—as Bishop herself does throughout her poetry—and refuses to accept the role of victim, whether as woman, orphan, immigrant, lesbian, or poet. One could make a great deal, for example, of the photograph from the National Geographic of the “black, naked women with necks / wound round and round with wire / like the necks of light bulbs,” just as Aunt Consuelo sits beneath the surgical aggression of what is presumably a male dentist in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1918. But these oppressions, as they translate into Bishop's own in the poem, are left indirect and implicit. Elaine Showalter speaks of women writers and their work as “a double-voiced discourse containing a ‘dominant’ and a ‘muted’ story.” Bishop's story as a feminist is, accordingly, a muted one. It should be noted that Bishop did write poems, such as “Roosters” and “Songs for a Colored Singer,” in which she exposes the manipulation and abuse of females by males, but she is not in these poems herself depicted as such a victim. In fact, she resisted the feminist designation. In an interview in 1977 she insisted, “When I was in college and started publishing, even then, and in the following few years, there were women's anthologies, and all-women-issues of magazines, but I always refused to be in them. I didn't think about it very seriously, but I felt it was a lot of nonsense, separating the sexes.” One cannot imagine an Adrienne Rich, born eighteen years after Bishop, denying such a separation. In another interview Bishop said that a woman writer “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,” a protest Marianne Moore of the generation before Bishop seems hardly capable of making.

The “tough, ironic attitude” preempted the role of an overtly disaffected woman, at least when she was speaking in her own name. For some of the same reasons, Bishop distrusted the confessional poets of her own generation. With his volume Life Studies (1959), her friend Lowell became identified as the leader of the confessional poets, and he had briefly been the teacher of both Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. But Bishop found Sexton guilty of what she told Lowell was “a bit too much romanticism,” and of being part of “a school of female writing which is really boasting about how ‘nice’ we were.” She disliked another confessional poet (and another student of Lowell), W. D. Snodgrass, for the same reason: his self-congratulatory “I do all these awful things but don't you think I'm really nice.” And she complained to Time magazine in 1967 that: “The tendency is to overdo the morbidity. You just wish they'd keep some of these things to themselves.” What is clear from these remarks is Bishop's instinctive and temperamental distrust of bold emotion in any form in poetry, her resistance to that “a bit too much romanticism,” by which she defined Sexton, in favor of a more modulated and austere classicism.

In the end Bishop did find a release for bold emotion, both as a woman and as a victim in the wider sense. She did so through a series of poetically adopted disguises, just as in “In the Waiting Room” the persona of the nearly seven-year-old girl for the sixty-year-old poet is itself a kind of disguise. Three traits in her poetry, traits that define and distinguish her as a poet, served to hold in check the torrents of emotion that her verse tempered and tamed. Having assumed and mastered them, she found a nexus of feeling, a timing and process by which her deepest emotions could find expression.

The first trait is her scrupulous accuracy and precision of presentation. From the beginning, Bishop made this a goal. It was not that she, like Williams, was an instinctive nominalist, suspicious of all generalizations. Ideas, for her, did exist independently of things. But things had another value. In a world where everything was unsecured and transitory, where the ties of loved ones were so easily loosed, one's perceptions had better begin with the real. To Lowell she wrote in 1964: “My passion for accuracy may strike you as old-maidish—but since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way very carefully; who knows what might depend on it? So I'm enclosing a clipping about raccoons. But perhaps you prefer mythology.” If one is cut loose upon an “unknown sea,” the accuracy of the eye becomes the instrument of survival (“who knows what might depend on it?”). Lowell might prefer mythology, but Bishop trusted few myths. She would settle for smaller things. The question was once posed to her in an interview: “Do you think it is necessary for a poet to have a ‘myth’—Christian or otherwise—to sustain his work?” Bishop's reply:

It all depends—some poets do, some don't. You must have something to sustain you, but perhaps you needn't be conscious of it. Look at Robert Lowell: he's written just as good poetry since he left the Church. Look at Paul Klee: he had 16 paintings going at once; he didn't have a formulated myth to look at, apparently, and his accomplishment was very considerable. The question, I must admit, doesn't interest me a great deal. I'm not interested in big-scale work as such. Something needn't be large to be good.

Bishop's modesty is sincere but also severe. Rejecting “big-scale work” in favor of “a passion for accuracy,” she peers out on various topographies from her shifting vistas: different parts of North America, Europe, South America. Poetic emotion would be disciplined in the details of the observed and literal world, an empiricism of location and dislocation. “Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and,’” she says in “Over 2000 Illustrations and A Complete Concordance,” and in “The Fish,” “I stared and stared.” “‘Look at that, would you,’” says the bus driver to his passengers, while the moose, in turn, “looks the bus over” in “The Moose.” In “Arrival at Santos,” Bishop speaks to herself as tourist: “your immodest demands for a different world, / and a better life, and complete comprehension / of both at last, and immediately.” She seems repeatedly to be staring out windows or across balconies, as in the poems “A Miracle for Breakfast,” “Paris, 7 a.m.,” “Quai d'Orléans,” “The Armadillo,” “The Burglar of Babylon,” and others.

The total number of poems by Bishop is not large. After publication, there were few revisions. But a single poem could be years in the making, even decades. Some were never completed at all. The process of composition is important because it is another measure of how deliberately crafted were the impressions of off-handedness, spontaneity, and even self-revision within a poem by repetitions and rephrasings. Because, as she said, “I like to present complicated or mysterious ideas in the simplest possible way,” her “passion for accuracy” was patiently spent in the careful editing of her drafts.

Bishop's mentors in her practice of realism are many. Of Herbert, for example, she said, “To begin with, I like the absolute naturalness of tone.” Hopkins's inscapes made up another early influence: “A single short stanza can be as full of, aflame with, motion as one of Van Gogh's cedar trees.” But it was from a contemporary poet, Marianne Moore, that the greatest and most enduring impression was made upon the young Bishop. Moore, twenty-four years her senior, was another woman whose work was respected by Eliot, Pound, and Stevens. David Kalstone in his excellent study of the Moore-Bishop relationship suggests another reason for Bishop's interest, based on the two women's relationships with their mothers: “What must it have been like, for example, for a young woman who had not seen her mother since she was five to know an older poet who was inseparable from hers? And to have met Moore in the very year that Bishop's own long-absent mother died?” When Bishop, during her senior year at Vassar, went down to New York to meet Moore, an introduction arranged by the Vassar librarian, the two responded warmly to each other, though Bishop was careful to conceal at first her own writing of poems. Living in New York the year following her graduation, Bishop saw Moore often; later, visits and an energetic correspondence continued during the late 1930s when Bishop was living in Florida and sent to Moore copies of her poems and prose for criticism.

Moore's own poetry had impressed Bishop before the poets met: “Poems like ‘An Octopus,’ about a glacier, or ‘Peter,’ about a cat, or ‘Marriage,’ about marriage, struck me, as they still do, as miracles of language and construction. Why had no one ever written about things in this clear and dazzling way before?” wrote Bishop years later, as she recalled the initial discovery.

Kalstone believes that “Florida,” written five years after Bishop met Moore, is “the first poem to show Bishop's authentic transformation of Moore's style.” The influence is discernible much earlier, however. One may argue that Bishop's “The Imaginary Iceberg,” published a year after she left Vassar, owes as much to Moore's “An Octopus” as the later poem “Florida” owes to Moore's “The Frigate Pelican.” Bishop cites “An Octopus” as one of those poems she had discovered at Vassar and had admired as “miracles of language and construction.”

While “An Octopus” is a more literal landscape, a longer poem of more cumulative detail, like “The Imaginary Iceberg” it creates an imaginary object. Moore's poem is a description of a glacier on Mt. Ranier (climbed by Moore and her brother in 1922); its appearance from overhead was like that of an octopus. Here is six times the length of Bishop's poem. But both are imaginative reconstructions of a mammoth icy setting, simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. Both too share a quality of Moore's glacier: “Relentless accuracy is the nature of this octoupus / with its capacity for fact.” Bishop's iceberg is “Like jewelry from a grave.” And it “cuts its facets from within.” In “An Octopus,” the bears' den upon the glacier is “Composed of calcium gems and alabaster pillars.” It too cuts its facets: “the glassy octopus symmetrically pointed, / its claw cut by the avalanche.”

It is easy to note the differences between the two poems, but those critics who have recognized the influence of Moore upon Bishop, rightly emphasizing the role of the older poet's concision and congeries of detail, neglect another aspect of Moore's poetry, especially in “An Octopus”: its surreal other-worldliness. Writing about Moore's animal poems in 1948, Bishop was struck by the mixture of “the formally fabulous with the factual, and the artificial with the perfectly natural.” Such qualities, not ordinarily associated with Moore, were more pronounced in some of Bishop's earliest poems, those written shortly after she left Vassar: “The Man-Moth,” “Sleeping Standing Up,” “Paris, 7 a.m.,” as well as “The Imaginary Iceberg.”

Bishop's poems would never possess the disinterested coolness of Moore's unique examples. In the privacy of her notebook, Bishop complained in a subdued whisper: “the super-material content of the poems [by Moore] is too easy for the material involved—it could have meant more.” It would mean more in her own poems. Moore would never adopt Bishop's deliberate hesitations and indecisiveness, as in these lines from “Santarém”: “Of course I may be remembering it all wrong / after, after—how many years?” The groping repetition of single words and phrases in Bishop's poems is commonplace, a device to establish a companionable familiarity between her and her reader. Even Moore recognized that “tentativeness and interiorizing are your dangers as well as your strength.” At the same time, the younger poet learned from the older that a surface of apparent coolness could also provide its own undercurrent of powerful feeling. If Moore was, as Bishop called her, “The World's Greatest Living Observer,” she also found an urgency in Moore's penchant for accuracy: “The poems seem to say, ‘These things exist to be loved and honored and we must.’” It was the same urgency that she later described to Lowell: “I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way very carefully; who knows what might depend on it?”

Accuracy of eye and naturalness of tone accompany a second trait in Bishop's poetry—its metrical and syntactical variations. Even as an undergraduate at Vassar, Bishop determined to resist the too easy rhythm of the regular iamb. In a series of letters written in 1933 and 1934 to Donald Stanford, another young poet, she laid out with remarkable precociousnes her goals on the subject of rhythm. She would not subordinate meaning to smoothness of rhythm, or the action of thought and feeling to the inevitability of form:

I can write in iambics if I want to—but just now I don't know my own mind quite well enough to say what I want to in them. If I try to write smoothly I find myself perverting the meaning for the sake of the smoothness (and don't you do that sometimes yourself?) However, I think that an equally great ‘cumulative effect’ might be built up by a series of irregularities. Instead of beginning with an ‘uninterrupted mood’ what I want to do is to get the moods themselves into the rhythm. This is a very hard thing to explain, but for me there are two kinds of poetry, that (I think yours is of this sort) at rest, and that which is in action, within itself. At present it is too hard for me to get this feeling of action within the poem unless I just go ahead with it and let the meters find their way through.

The sprung rhythm of Hopkins was one such liberating discovery. In her essay on that poet in 1934, she admires the fact that such an irregular pattern of rhythm based solely on stressed syllables, irrespective of unstressed ones, was capable of “maintaining the rhythmic beat customary to poetry, with an enormous increase in the variations possible for setting it up.”

Penelope Laurans has written a useful essay on Bishop's prosody entitled “‘Old Correspondences’: Prosodic Transformations in Elizabeth Bishop.” In one of her footnotes, Laurans notes that “In the end, it seems fair to say that Bishop finds loosened meters more congenial than strict ones, shorter lines more arresting than longer, and stanzas with variable meters more appealing than stanzas with a consistent pattern.” It is well known that Bishop's “The Armadillo” influenced Lowell's transformation from the strict formalism of Lord Weary's Castle to the more colloquial and personal tone of Life Studies and, in particular, the writing of his poem “Skunk Hour.” Lowell acknowledged, “Rereading her I couldn't understand why my own style was so armored heavy and old-fashioned. A partial [imitation] of her tone, rhythms, imagery, stanza construction, etc. seemed to give me the means for a break-through from my fortifications.” Bishop's rhythms, like her diction, are steadily conversational, another device encouraging a friendly and familiar intimacy with the reader. Her shifts from line to line among dimeters, trimeters, and tetrameters—more rarely pentameters—enable her to stalk the moment of lyrical or emotional intensity but then to resist it by a shift in rhythm, a reversal in diction, or the infusion of a startling image. These lines make up one stanza from “Crusoe in England,” an illustration of the way meter builds toward a climax and then repudiates it:

Because I didn't know enough.
Why didn't I know enough of something?
Greek drama or astronomy? The books
I'd read were full of blanks;
the poems—well, I tried
reciting to my iris-beds,
“They flash upon that inward eye,
which is the bliss …” The bliss of what?
One of the first things that I did
when I got back was look it up.

The insistent tetrameter almost prevails in these lines but not quite: “Becaúse I didn't knów enoúgh” is broken by “Why didn't I knów enoúgh of sómething?” But then immediately a return to the tetrameter: “The bóoks / I'd réad were fúll of blańks; / the poéms—wéll, I tried …” where the caesura before “well, I tried” abruptly resets the pace by denying the expected iamb. At this point Crusoe remembers Wordsworth, but imperfectly, encountering the solitude of “I wondered lonely as a cloud.” The tetrameters, embracing Wordsworth's, are even stronger:

                                        well, I tried
reciting to my iris-beds,
“They flash upon that inward eye,
which is the bliss …” The bliss of what?

Here the lure of incantation, the narcotic lull, is broken, first by the ellipsis to be filled of course by Wordsworth's unstated and forgotten words “of solitude,” but more emphatically by the next two lines: “Ońe of the first things that I did / when Í gót báck was lóok it úp.” The sudden troche (Ońe ŏf) and spondee (first things) are rough displacements of the soothing Wordsworthian and Bishopian iambs of musical harmony. Bishop refuses to permit Crusoe's lonely anguish to succumb to smooth nostalgia, and one of the ways she accomplishes this is by withdrawing smooth meter. Laurans has shown a similar method at work in the poem “The Armadillo”: “The habitually shifting rhythms of the poem do not allow the reader to lose himself in its lyric music; instead, they keep jolting him to recognition, thereby keeping him from ‘taking sides’—from becoming, that is, too caught up either in the beauty of the balloons or the terror of the animals.” Prosodic dexterity is one of the great traits of Bishop. She is not typically a poet of free verse, just as rhymes are rarely completely banished. But it is a dexterity constructed upon versatility and evasiveness.

While at Vassar, Bishop came across an essay by Morris W. Croll entitled “The Baroque Style in Prose.” Its impact was immediate and profound: she began citing it in her correspondence and in the essay on Hopkins that she published in the Vassar Review shortly after. Croll's essay examines the anti-Ciceronian rhetoric of writers such as Browne, Pascal, and Montaigne: “An immense rhetorical complexity and license took the place of the simplicity and purism of the sixteenth century; and, since the age had not yet learned to think much about grammatical propriety, the rules of syntax were made to bear the expenses of the new freedom.” Bishop regarded such expenses well worth the paying, and she quickly saw how the syntax of seventeenth-century prose connected to the poetry of Hopkins and to her own self-conscious experiments. In the Hopkins essay she wrote: “I have found some striking sentences which I think express the matter equally well as regards Hopkins. Speaking of the writers of baroque prose [Croll] says, ‘Their purpose was to portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking. … They … deliberately chose as the moment of expression that in which the idea first clearly objectifies itself in the mind, in which, therefore, each of its parts still preserves its own peculiar emphasis and an independent vigor of its own—in brief, the moment in which truth is still imagined.’”

If a poem could convey a “mind thinking” with “an independent vigor of its own,” no more than meter need its syntax conform to regularity. Clauses could be asymetrical; conjunctions could be omitted, creating a loose parataxis—an accretion of elements without clear, logical connections. Anacoluthon—the abandonment within a sentence of one kind of grammatical structure for another—was permissible. To Stanford she recommended Croll's essay as “a very good description of what I mean about poetry.”

Croll's illustrations led her, in her own poetry, not just to a direct imitation of Hopkins, though there were such exercises; rather, the baroque style offered her a way to manipulate feelings within a poem by gradations and variations as opposed to a presentation directly fixed. “The Map” was written within a year of her reading of Croll:

Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of the long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?

The poem's first line conforms to Croll's definition of one of the baroque modes: “We may describe it best by observing that the first member [sentence] is likely to be a self-contained and complete statement of the whole idea … ; logically there is nothing more to say. But it does not exhaust its imaginative truth or the energy of its conception.” (Bishop had quoted this passage in her letter to Stanford.)

The second sentence of “The Map” (ll. 2-4) begins Bishop's process of portraying “not a thought but a mind thinking.” The sentence, in fact, is a fragment, followed by an alternative explanation posed as a question, followed by a rephrasing of the question. The poem imitates the vicissitudes of a mind in action, speaking in a familiar, prosaic voice that would be typical of Bishop's poetry thereafter. The diction itself is emotionally disinterested, though an explicit reprimand for emotion in excess of its causes follows a further examination of the map:

The names of seashore towns run out to sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
—the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.

The poem's final stanza examines the colors on the map by which the different countries are identified. Bishop's own briefly indulged emotion is quietly set in the poem's last line: “Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West. / More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.” For all their excess, she prefers the poet's colors to those of the literalists, the printer's “emotion” to cartographical precision. But the rhetorical inversion in the last line, the use of the plural possessives, where the noun they modify is withheld until the last word (“colors”), and the delicacy itself modified by its presentation as a comparative (“More delicate”), all serve to modulate the sentiment of delicacy, to cover it over so to speak, or qualify it, and in so doing, to enhance it.

The example of the seventeenth-century prose stylists and the essay by Croll reassured Bishop that poetry could convey a mind in action preserving the formal irregularities of unrehearsed thought—or at least the impression thereof. By such irregularities, reshapings, and circumlocutions, the placement of emotion within a poem could emerge in an indirection and subtlety that suited her own reticent temperament. This procedure, too, would remain constant throughout her career.

The final trait that I wish to identify has less to do with technique, though it is not unrelated to it. It is Bishop's resistance of ultimate pessimism and despair, in spite of the personal tragedies of her life. If what the eye beholds (“my passion for accuracy”) and what the ear hears (“I think that an equally great ‘cumulative effect’ might be built up by a series of irregularities”) account for the poem's delay, concealment and repression of emotion, how then does the poem finally accommodate it at all? Writing of Marianne Moore, Eliot might have been speaking of Bishop: “For a mind of such agility, and for a sensibility so reticent, the minor subject, such as a pleasant little sand-coloured skipping animal, may be the best release for the major emotions. … We all have to choose whatever subject-matter allows us the most powerful and most secret release; and that is a personal affair.” Emotion and its release are contained in the poet's personal choice of subject matter, and for Bishop that involved poems of places well defined and small moments modestly captured. The voice that speaks is not easily given to dramatic posturings; rather, it remains steady, self-possessed, uncondescending.

At the same time, Bishop asks in her essay on Marianne Moore, “Surely there is an element of mortal panic and fear underlying all works of art?” She seems to have believed so, but as she said to Anne Stevenson, such dreads had to be contained—indeed, resisted. She must again have been thinking of the tragedies of her personal life: “I think we are still barbarians, barbarians who commit a hundred indecencies and cruelties every day of our lives, as just possibly future ages may be able to see. But I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy—to make life endurable and keep ourselves ‘new, tender, quick.’” The tough stoicism of Bishop makes for a constant poetic self-disciplining. Thomas Travisano argues that “In poem after poem, self-pity is entertained but given no quarter.” It was her obdurate self-control in the face of suffering that gave Bishop as a poet her “most powerful and most secret release.” Mortal panic and fear may not underlie all works of art, but they do underlie many of Bishop's own poems, though she would counter them with a Yeatsian gaiety.

When Bishop was twenty-three years old, she wrote an essay for the Vassar Journal of Undergraduate Studies entitled “Dimensions for a Novel.” No novice to the theme of loss in her own life (though the essay makes no such personal allusion), she spoke of its lingering effects: “If I suffer a terrible loss and do not realize it till several years later among different surroundings, then the important fact is not the original loss so much as the circumstance of the new surroundings which succeeded in letting the loss through to my consciousness.” Forty-two years later she demonstrated this process of discovering loss in different surroundings in her villanelle, “One Art.” The poem ends with a rare self-portrayal of her personal disasters, though it names no names—either of cities, rivers, continent, or you:

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.

Here is the loss of Petrópolis and Ouro Prêto in Brazil, the loss of the continent of South America, and probably the loss of her beloved Lota de Macedo Soares. The sense of personal disaster is more powerful as a result of the poet's near desperate attempts to fend it off. The final line stumbles and stutters as it nears the held-off blow of the final word.

In a less dramatic fashion, in “Five Flights Up,” the poet observes the stirrings of daybreak, always a favorite moment for Bishop, and notes the first tentative cries of a bird, the first yapping of a dog. It is a scene of serenity and renewal until the final line:

He and the bird know everything is answered,
all taken care of,
no need to ask again.
—Yesterday brought to today so lightly!

(A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift.)

The use of the qualifying adverb “almost” and the relegation of the final line to the parenthetical aside check the poet's own momentary concession to the burdens of her own personal yesterday. The whole poem is made to balance on that line, but not to tilt or surrender to it. In the moment of repudiated pessimism, but—again—barely repudiated, Bishop is not unlike Robert Frost, in his “What but design of darkness to appall?— / If design govern in a thing so small” or in:

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went—
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.
But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.

Both poets court the sensation of a dramatic emotional climax, but then immediately force its diminution by some act of qualification, equivocation, or denial.

Again in the essay on Hopkins from The Vassar Review, Bishop speaks of the “sustained emotional height” of Hopkins's poetry and the “depth of the emotional source from which it arises.” The young critic is obviously influenced by Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as she goes on to describe the reconstitution of emotion as it is transformed from its raw experience into art. She creates, however, her own metaphor, a physics of emotional displacement by which subtraction and reduction lead to a new “filling up”:

A poem is begun with a certain volume of emotion, intellectualized or not according to the poet, and as it is written out of this emotion, subtracted from it, the volume is reduced—as water drawn off from the bottom of a measure reduces the level of the water at the top. Now, I think, comes a strange and yet natural filling up of the original volume—with the emotion aroused by the lines or stanzas just completed. The whole process is a continual flowing fullness kept moving by its own weight, the combination of original emotion with the created, crystallized emotion.

In her own poetry the “crystallized emotion” would be far more muted than that in the work of the oracular Hopkins, even though there occurs a similar displacement of emotion. Bishop's is more the reportorial eye of a journalist than the portentous or sublime eye of the Romantic poet. She often found it easiest to describe herself by adopting the disguises of others, much as the middle-aged Bishop is filtered through the seven-year-old Elizabeth in “In the Waiting Room.” Another late poem, “First Death in Nova Scotia,” also takes the perspective of a very young girl. “The Man-Moth,” a poem written during Bishop's early twenties, captures her own family-less and friendless existence in New York City. Her mother's madness becomes Ezra Pound's in “Visits to St. Elizabeths,” where the name of the hospital converges with that of the author. In a similar way, in “The Moose,” the tragedies outlined by the anonymous grandparents and overheard from the back of the bus parallel strikingly Bishop's own biography. There is more than a little of Bishop in both the character of the fleeing Micuçú in “The Burglar of Babylon” and in that of the prodigal son in “The Prodigal.” There are many other examples, but I want to conclude by returning to “Crusoe in England,” written after Bishop's own return from Brazil to Boston toward the end of her life.

The poem recounts Crusoe's memories of his solitary existence in a remote land, a foreign environment from which he has been rescued and brought home to England. Bishop herself never suffered shipwreck, but she arrived in Brazil in 1951 aboard a freighter. Suffering from an allergic reaction to the fruit of the cashew in Rio, she was left behind by her fellow tourists and wound up staying eighteen years. Crusoe remembers his self-questioning while he was on the deserted island:

“Do I deserve this? I suppose I must.
I wouldn't be here otherwise. Was there
a moment when I actually chose this?
I don't remember, but there could have been.”

(And the narrator then adds, “What's wrong about self-pity, anyway?”) But Crusoe himself fills his days in exile with makeshift art: he plays a homemade flute and dances among the goats. Snail shells at a distance become “beds of irises,” and “One day I dyed a baby goat bright red / with my red berries, just to see / something a little different.” Then came Friday, a sure surrogate for Bishop's own Brazilian friend, Lota de Macedo Soares:

Just when I thought I couldn't stand it
another minute longer, Friday came.
(Accounts of that have everything all wrong.)
Friday was nice.
Friday was nice, and we were friends.
If only he had been a woman!
I wanted to propagate my kind,
and so did he, I think, poor boy.
He'd pet the baby goats sometimes,
and race with them, or carry one around.
—Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.

The idyl is interrupted, however: “And then one day they came and took us off.” Crusoe exchanges his private island for the British isle. He is now, he tells us, old and bored; Friday did not, like Lota, commit suicide, but the poem ends with the acute pang of Crusoe's loss: “And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles / seventeen years ago come March.”

As we have seen, Bishop was a woman who knew estrangement. Deserted by most of those on whom she had claims of love, she was an orphan, a geographically rootless traveler, an asthmatic frequently hospitalized, and hospitalized too for depression and alcoholism. Through the various geographies of her self, she was “an Elizabeth” who echoed the sharp cry from the dentist's chair as her own. A sense of loss is never far from her poems. But Bishop's distrust of overt emotion—the quality she abhorred in the confessional poets—schooled her to a more austere poetics. Beginning with a commitment to clarity of vision and exactitude of depiction (“Who knows what might depend on it?”), she worked from her Vassar years toward a verse that repudiated “smoothness” of meter and syntax in favor of a rhythm “in action” rather than “at rest.” The strain between smoothness and roughness, regularity and irregularity, set up a prosodic field in which the themes of nostalgia and loss could subtly play. Finally, through the artful disguises of figures such as the seven-year-old Elizabeth or Crusoe or the man-moth, she found a way to express the most intimate recesses of her self.

Bishop is a great poet because she is a heart-breaking poet, who implies pain without sentimentalizing it, who elucidates suffering by a fierce resistance to it. Suspicious of all bold emotion, she learned how to subtract it by objectifying and transforming it. Because her aims were modest, she was content with presentation that was merely accurate but not, in her words, “big-scale work as such. Something needn't be large to be good.”