[In the following essay, originally published in the Spring 1962 issue of The Minnesota Review, Frank places Bishop among the best poets and fiction writers of the “Lost Generation.”]

John Peale Bishop, who died in 1944, was one of the most gifted and sensitive talents among the American writers who came to maturity after the First World War. A classmate of Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald at Princeton, Bishop was the third member of a triumvirate destined to take a prominent place in modern American letters; but his own work never won him the fame of his collegiate friends. Bishop was an exacting rather than a powerful writer, and his limited production, perfect though much of it was, never imposed itself on the American literary scene with the impact necessary to make a lasting impression. Even the posthumous publication in 1948 of his Collected Poems and his Collected Essays did little to remedy this unjust situation.¹

One of the criticisms most frequently made of Bishop during his lifetime was that his work lacked unity—that it was fragmentary and peripheral, destitute of any serious focus. R. P. Blackmur once neatly summarized the prevalent impression by calling Bishop a “superlative amateur,” who gave the sense of writing poetry as an “avocation” rather than out of whole-souled dedication and passionate purpose.² Such an impression can hardly persist, however, if one reads Bishop's work as a whole—both his creative and critical prose as well as his poetry; for what then strikes one most forcefully is the constancy of Bishop's preoccupation with the spiritual dilemma of his generation.

Bishop defined this dilemma himself in a much-quoted article called “The Missing All” (the phrase is from a poem by Emily Dickinson); it is the dilemma familiar to all readers of Hemingway—the breakdown of values as an aftermath of the First World War. All of Bishop's work is a response to this breakdown, which formed the existential horizon of his generation; but Bishop's own evolution is quite unique, and it is impossible to place him in any convenient and familiar category. His feeling for tradition and for formal values in literature, his sense that man needed some ultimate metaphysical justification, linked him with the followers of T. S. Eliot; and he was allied by sympathy and personal friendship with Allen Tate and the Southern Agrarians. Yet the sense of life in his later work reminds one more of D. H. Lawrence than of any other contemporary writer. And his achievement is precisely to have created an original and very appealing synthesis—small in scale though impressive in quality—of these two major antagonistic traditions of modern Anglo-American literature.

I

John Peale Bishop's début in the turbulent literary world of the twenties was not particularly auspicious. His first book of poems, published in 1917, bears the modest title Green Fruit; and the suggestion of immaturity is indicative both of Bishop's modesty and of his critical intelligence. For the poems are indeed filled with youthful echoes of fin-de-siècle decadence, obviously garnered from the pages of Swinburne and The Yellow Book—the favorite reading of literary undergraduates of Bishop's generation.

By the time Bishop published his second book, however, written in collaboration with Edmund Wilson, he had gone through the archetypal war experience of his generation. And the very title of the work—a curious potpourri of prose and verse in celebration of death called The Undertaker's Garland (1922)—reveals its typical orientation. The Undertaker's Garland unmistakably bears the stamp of its time—a time when Edna St. Vincent Millay was burning the candle at both ends in Greenwich Village, when the revolt against Puritanism was in full swing, and when the contributors to Civilization in the United States were jubilantly declaring that no such thing existed. Both young writers, after their contact with war and Europe, found the Puritan materialism of their homeland intolerable. And in a book defiantly dedicated to death, they set out to épater les Américains as best they could.

Much the most important of Bishop's contributions to this high-spirited volume is a short story called “Resurrection.” Here we feel the naked impact of Bishop's war experience for the first time, uncluttered by the pseudo-macabre bric-à-brac marring his other efforts. Little more than an anecdote, the story pictures the disinterment of a dead American soldier for reburial. A young lieutenant almost faints at the sight of the decaying, putrescent corpse, and he returns to his tent haunted by “the pervasive odor of decay; the blanketed mass he had just seen, with its poor upturned face, had broken down within him some last wall of resisting flesh.” It is the contrast between this feeling and the images ordinarily evoked by the word “resurrection” on which the story plays; the result is a grim, unspoken irony similar to the minor poems of Hardy. And here is the first groping statement of what was to become Bishop's perennial theme—the bare and brutal facts of physical reality in conflict with the values by which man tries to dignify his brief existence.

The Undertaker's Garland marks the end of Bishop's juvenilia and the beginning of a period of literary stock-taking that lasted for almost a decade. During this time Bishop printed an occasional review or poem; but it was only in 1931 that he brought out a volume of stories, Many Thousands Gone, and this was followed in 1932 by a volume of poetry, Now With His Love. These books initiate Bishop's mature work; and to follow his development we may start most conveniently with the volume of poetry. This contains work written over the intervening period, and it will allow us to trace the evolution of Bishop's themes from the immediate reflection of his war trauma to the search for a tradition and a metaphysical order that would exorcise its effects.

II

Bishop's poetry, in The Undertaker's Garland, had still been filled with the vestiges of late nineteenth-century mannerisms; but in the interval his poetic style had considerably matured. Now the sensuous clarity of Eliot and Pound are noticeable influences, along with the taut symbolic lyricism of Yeats and the Valéry of Charmes. Bishop, indeed, experiments in this volume with a variety of poetic styles, as he was to continue to do all through his life. But as Allen Tate has argued, a good poem in a period style is still a good poem;³ and Now With His Love is filled with good poems that have an unmistakably personal note. Moreover, as the title from Chaucer indicates, the book has a good deal of thematic unity as well. For the experience of “Resurrection” has by no means been forgotten; and it is only love that the poet finds to obliterate the horror.

In reading the love-and-war poems of Now With His Love we are irresistibly reminded of the early Hemingway, also obsessed with death, also seeking for a source of positive value in naked sensuous experience. It is no accident that Bishop returned again and again to Hemingway in his critical writings, and that his “Homage to Hemingway” is one of the finest studies of that writer. “His vision of life,” Bishop writes, “is one of perpetual annihilation. Since the will can do nothing against circumstance, choice is precluded; those things are good which the senses report good; and beyond their brief record there is only the remorseless devaluation of nature, which, like the vast blue flowing of the Gulf Stream beyond Havana, bears away of our great hopes, emotions and ambitions only a few and soon disintegrating trifles.” Bishop here is not only analyzing Hemingway; he is defining one essential aspect of his own work.

But this vision of life does not lead Bishop—as it led Hemingway or, to mention a poet of Bishop's generation, Archibald MacLeish—into a glorification of the primitive. It is a fact of particular significance that Bishop's images of sensuous beauty are invariably expressed in terms of art, the art of the Mediterranean world, of Greece and the Italian Renaissance. Bishop, indeed, is one of the few modern writers in English (the early Ezra Pound and D. H. Lawrence are others) who have been able to write genuinely erotic love poetry without falling into either vulgarity or platitude; and the reason lies in the classical purity of his feeling for the body and the senses. The following stanza from his beautiful “Metamorphoses of M,” for example, illustrates the precise elegance of his refined and filtered sensuality. Nor should one fail to note the casual complexity of the controlling paradox, with its imagery as from an early Renaissance tapestry playfully reproducing some monkish bestiary of the Middle Ages:

Your beauty is not used. Though you have lain
A thousand nights upon my bed, you rise
Always so splendidly renewed that I have thought,
Seeing the sweet continence of your breast,
Mole-spotted, your small waist, and long slim thigh,
That even the unicorn that savage beast
If he should startle on you fresh from light
Would be so marvelled by virginity
That he would come, trotting and mild,
To lay his head upon your fragrant lap
And be surprised.

This is the world of love (real and yet ideal) that Bishop posed against the nihilistic experience of death shared by his generation. “All loveliness demands our courtesies,” he writes in a later poem (“Recollection”), which sums up this phase of his work. And the word “courtesy” (the troubadour cortezia) could not have been better chosen. For Bishop's attitude toward loveliness is precisely that of a stately formal obeisance, controlled by a discipline for which the senses, like the Platonic Eros, are valuable only as an avenue to a higher realm of the spirit.

III

Bishop knew too much history, however, to believe that such an avenue could be simply the personal construction of an isolated individual. It is culture that mediates between the senses and the spirit in Bishop's poetry; and culture implies tradition. A number of poems in Now With His Love deal with the breakdown of such traditions—not only that of Christianity, but those of classical antiquity and of the eclectic modern world as well. “The Return” vividly evokes the despairing torpor of vanquished Rome waiting for the arrival of the conqueror. And in “Ballet”—obviously inspired by the painting of Dali and Chirico, as well as by the poetry of Cocteau—the chaos of the contemporary world is depicted in a frightening mise en scène. The best embodiment of this theme, however, is “Perspectives are Precipices,” one of the most widely known of Bishop's poems. Allen Tate has sensitively analyzed the manner in which this work achieves the effects of painting;⁴ but it also contains a number of Bishop's key symbols and has far more than merely a formal significance.

Bishop uses an incident from the conclusion of the Bluebeard story in Perrault's Fairy Tales as a framework for the poem. Bluebeard is about to kill his most recent wife for having looked into the room where his other victims are hanging; but he gives her a few minutes' grace to say her prayers. During this time she calls her Sister Anne, and asks the latter to mount to the tower and see if their brothers are riding to the rescue. Bishop discards all the incidents of the Bluebeard story, but he keeps the question-and-answer refrain of the dialogue between the wife and Sister Anne; and he turns the rescue motif into a symbolic comment on the fate of modern culture. For while in the tale the brothers arrive to confound Bluebeard and save their sisters, the erstwhile rescuer in Bishop's poem recedes rather than approaches and finally vanishes altogether.

What Sister Anne spies when she goes to the tower is a road running through a harshly sunlit desert landscape; and this would appear to be the track of abstract time starting in the past and continuing into the future (“I see a distance of black yews / Long as the history of the Jews”). On the road is “a man who goes / Dragging a shadow by its toes”; in his hand is an empty pitcher, mouth down:

Sister Anne, Sister Anne,
What do you see?
                    His dwindling stride. And he seems blind
                    Or worse to the prone man behind.
Sister Anne! Sister Anne!
                    I see a road. Beyond nowhere
                    Defined by cirrus and blue air.
                    I saw a man but he is gone
                    His shadow gone into the sun.

Man's shadow would appear to refer to his past, to history and to time as human continuity (perhaps there is an implied reference here to the sundial). But he is “blind or worse” to his past and pursues his path “beyond nowhere” till he vanishes completely into nature. Typical for Bishop is the sun-baked landscape, the symbolic importance of “shadow,” and, as Mr. Tate has noted, the “spatial” quality of the imagery (“Wide plains surrounding silence”). The use of such imagery clearly is linked with the theme of time's obliteration.

To counterbalance such a future, only the birth of a new cultural tradition will suffice; and this need furnishes the inspiration for “Speaking of Poetry.” The problem of the poet, of course, is the age-old one of maintaining the proper equilibrium between inspiration and discipline, passion and reason. But for Bishop this is the problem of culture as well; and, using symbolism drawn from Othello, he takes this as his theme. How can the delicate Desdemona, the flower of Venetian culture, be truly united with the dark and passionate Moor? Othello is still an inchoate force of nature, powerful but undisciplined; any irregular union between the two will lead to disaster;

O, it is not enough
that they should meet, naked, at dead of night
in a small inn on a dark canal. Procurers
less expert than Iago can arrange as much.
The ceremony must be found.
Traditional, with all its symbols
ancient as the metaphors in dreams;
strange, with never before heard music; continuous
until the torches deaden at the bedroom door.

The ceremony must be found. And Bishop's book of short stories, Many Thousands Gone (1931), indicates where he thought it might be discovered—or at least where an American could requicken his sense of what such a ceremony had meant in his own past. The stories of Many Thousands Gone, all of which deal with incidents occurring in Virginia during the Civil War, are in effect a condensed moral history of the South; and they should be read in conjunction with Bishop's article “The South and Tradition” (1933). Bishop was himself of mixed New England and Virginia stock; but his boyhood had been spent in West Virginia, and he easily identified himself in feeling with the Southern Agrarians. His relation to the Agrarians, however, should not be overstressed; for he always remained his own man, and what he took from his Agrarian friends was immediately transformed into his own personal terms.

Like the Agrarians, Bishop disliked the world of science, mechanization, and the machine that had dehumanized modern life. What attracted him to the myth of the South—and he had no hesitation in calling it a myth—was the sense of moral certainty that he felt had once existed at the heart of Southern life. This moral certainty had enabled his Southern great-uncles to ride off to war heroically, while his own generation of Americans had gone to face their ordeal by fire with no real beliefs to sustain them. What Hemingway was seeking in the Spanish bull ring at about the same time—a moral code that would enable one to face death unflinchingly—Bishop sought in the image of a society that had seemed to provide such a code, and, moreover, could not be held responsible for the bleak materialism and Puritanical hypocrisy of American life that he had already castigated in The Undertaker's Garland.

But, while Bishop might persuade himself intellectually that such a tradition had existed in the South, he was too honest a writer to force his feelings. What he had experienced, as a member of the Lost Generation, was the breakdown of tradition; and when he came to write his stories of the South he chose to portray what he could feel. For he takes the Southern tradition at a moment when it had already hardened into a lifeless and moribund convention or was collapsing under the impact of war and invasion. All the stories reinforce the same theme of a society in bondage to the past, a society whose conventions are no longer adequate to cope with reality. And in one story, “If Only,” he produces a little masterpiece.

All that remains of the Southern tradition here is a pitiful and morbid nostalgia; it has become a dream world of wish and desire, a world of fantasy which is well conveyed in the slightly Kafkaesque quality of detail. The action concerns two Southern gentlewomen, pathetically living on their memories, who hire a miraculous Negro cook named Bones. As if by magic, Bones turns dream into reality: “With this one tall, black, jovial Negro in the house it was as though the War had never been fought or, having been fought, had turned into a triumph for the South.” Bones' extravagances soon drive them to the brink of penury; and they finally discover that he is literally mad. But they find themselves unable to drive him away. “With him they lived in terror, but in the tradition. … They would keep him, as it were a dear obsession, till they were dead.” The unforced symbolism of Bishop's story, which focuses in a microcosm the tragic white-Negro relationship in the South, has the inevitable rightness of a completely realized achievement.

IV

Despite Bishop's volume of stories, American themes had shown up in only one or two of the poems in Now With His Love. But in his next volume, Minute Particulars (1935), we find one sequence of five poems devoted to New England, and another, called “Experience in the West,” dealing with the theme of the American pioneer. The New England group is personal—the poet's return to the land of his ancestors, where he finds abandoned, “dishonored houses” and a countryside scarred by the defacements of industrialism. “There is no sustenance in this ground,” he concludes.

“Experience in the West” is more ambitious, and on the whole more successful, in conveying a complex historical experience in Bishop's carefully wrought pictorial symbols. These poems, with their sensuously compelling visual surfaces, appear vivid enough on first reading though somewhat obscure. But just as his fellow Symbolist Yeats provided glosses on his poetry in A Vision and other prose works, so Bishop was in the habit of explaining his symbols in his criticism; and the best way to read “Experience in the West” is to see what he says about the American pioneer in his articles of the mid-thirties.

In his brilliant and moving study of the Lost Generation, “The Missing All,” Bishop remarks that Puritanism—the New England idea—had gone bad in the Midwest. Puritanism originally had been based on a hatred of nature, and the ordeal of the wilderness had only increased that hatred; but the original transcendental meaning of this emotion was lost in being transplanted. “The meaning of Puritanism is a contempt for mortality; in the Midwest it was forgotten.” When the pioneer came out of the forest onto the prairies, he had been toughened physically but emptied spiritually; he had sloughed off all his traditional values and was left with only a hatred-of-life that had lost its religious rationale. This theme begins in Bishop's “The Burning Wheel,” which describes the pioneer carrying his culture on his back as Aeneas carried Anchises:

They, too, the stalwart conquerors of space
Each on his shoulders wore a wise delirium
Of memory and age: ghostly embrace
Of Fathers slanted toward a western tomb.

These burdens stayed “Aloft, until they were as light as autumn / Shells of locusts”; and were finally deposited in some “Wilderness oblivion.”

“Green Centuries” then evokes an image of the forest in which the pioneer lost his soul. “In green no soul was found, / In that green savage clime / Such ignorance of time.” Time—which is always Bishop's word for history, continuity, tradition, for the ebb and flow of human experience—comes to a stop “when every day dawned Now.” And time is replaced by space, quality by quantity: “Time dreams eternity / Their nights were starred with space.” But the end of the poem finds the pioneer's “death-set face” assuming “an idle frown”; his task is done, his virtues superfluous. This is a preparation for “Loss in the West,” whose gloss may be found in some remarks Bishop made about the Idaho novelist Vardis Fisher. “The heroic age is past,” he writes. “Courage and hope, those two most admirable virtues of the frontiersman, have become in this late and unpromising land [Idaho, the last frontier] cruelly meaningless.”

“Cast out of the fray / The man in the coonskin cap.” The pioneer no longer has a place in modern life (“What have we to do with a fear that stalked / In a savage unlit wood?”). But the world that the pioneer created still continues its restless and never-ending expansion:

Yet gaunt—bone, gut, sinews—
Something like man pursued
And still pursues
What? Wheel of the sun
In Heaven? The west wind? Or only a will
To his own destruction?

And this pursuit is presented in the fourth and final poem—ironically entitled “O Pioneers”—under the guise of a pioneer party that has lost its way in search of gold and perishes in the desert. Thematically, at least, these poems seem to me to stand by themselves in American literature as a direct rejection of the myth of the frontier. And to feel their full force they should be read against the background of those works of Whitman, Hart Crane, and Archibald MacLeish that celebrate the pioneer mystique.

It was part of Bishop's cosmopolitanism that, despite his preoccupation with America, he never shared the cultural nationalism that led to the belief in American “uniqueness.” As he explains in his important article on “The Golden Bough,” the blind forward surge of the American pioneer is merely one aspect of the scientific conquest of nature—the conquest of space—begun in the Renaissance. And this whole movement has had the same effect on Western culture as the pioneer ethos had on American life. It has destroyed all traditional standards of man, without replacing them by anything equally viable. This is the theme of “O Let Not Virtue Seek,” one of Bishop's most ambitious poems but not among his most successful; it suffers from the attempt to combine Symbolist obliquity and Shakespearean declamation. But it is instructive to see how he juxtaposes the quantitative universe of science against the qualitative uniqueness of human experience. Astronomy has now given us “unavailable millenniums” but “we stifle for a second / When desire bends our knees above our love.” The two orders are incommensurate; and even worse, as he remarks in the same article, “we have reached the skeptical point where we see the scientific universe as a projection of our own immortal desire for order, yet realize that it leaves all our desires, even that desire, unsatisfied.”

V

If Bishop's poetry had done nothing more than dramatize this dilemma, it would be difficult, despite individual successes, to accord him any higher rank than that of a gifted epigone. But Bishop's most original poetry attempts to go beyond despair in an entirely independent direction, and to communicate a sense of a cosmic order in which modern man can believe. “For,” he writes, “it is only by perceiving order in those external forces on which his continuance depends, that man can hope to bring his own being into accord with them.” In his Selected Poems (1941), the last book to appear in his lifetime, Bishop took three poems from Minute Particulars and grouped them together. These compose his first answer to the dichotomy of modern culture; and it is regrettable that when these poems have been noticed at all their true impact has been either overlooked or misunderstood.

Even Allen Tate, who has done more than anyone else to keep Bishop's reputation alive, went wide of the mark in commenting on this phase of his friend's work. For Mr. Tate speaks of one of these poems, “Divine Nativity,” as attempting “to use the Christian myth” and then collapsing “with a final glance at anthropology.” But there is a collapse only if we believe the two are incompatible and that Bishop, as Mr. Tate writes, was attempting “to replace our secular philosophy, in which he does not believe, with a vision of the divine, in which he tries to believe.”⁵ Bishop's “vision of the divine” is one in which the opposition between Christianity and anthropology has ceased to exist; and the great merit of these poems is precisely that of creating a world in which this antagonism is nullified.

Once again it is illuminating to turn to Bishop's “Golden Bough” article for a commentary. “In Sir James Frazer's pages,” Bishop writes, “there is revealed what one may in all simplicity call the true religion of mankind.” Bishop argues that Frazer's researches in anthropology, far from destroying Christianity (as the nineteenth century believed), have on the contrary given it a new authenticity. For if we take “religion as a revelation of human destiny, we must see that He is not less divine because of the company of Adonis, Osiris and Thammuz. His divinity is to be found in precisely those attributes which He shares with these other and older incarnate gods.” The central mystery of Christianity is the Mass, which “turns out to be a symbolic presentation of the eternal relation of man to a living and sustaining earth.” The Mass derives from the immemorial worship of the Vegetable God; but it transforms “what was originally a form of expressing physical concerns to spiritual ends.” Religion, we now see, arose out of the fear that life might cease; it succeeds in giving death and disintegration a positive meaning, and endows the elemental lusts and passions with human significance.

From this point of view, the role of death in authentic religion—or at least in Bishop's “true religion of mankind”—must be carefully distinguished from the death-longing of asceticism, “the belief in dying as an escape from time and change into the unchanging and timeless.” Bishop argues that the ascetic element in Christianity, its “peculiar taint of death,” is closer “to the collapse of the State than to the rise of the Church.” In other words, it is not an essential component of that part of Christianity explored by Frazer. For the worship of the Vegetable God, the true religion of mankind, is based on “knowledge of the revolving year and the memory of the season's return”; it is “coeval with the conception of time.” Asceticism is an escape from time and change, a residual vestige of the earliest ages when man lived “in a savage jungle of fear … and there [were] no gods and no time.”

These reflections throw a good deal of light on what Bishop was trying to do in the poems in question. “The Saints,” for example, shows us a group of starvelings staggering through a landscape of “bright waste of sands” and “desert rock.” These are certainly the ascetics trying to escape from time:

Subduing time
In naked trance,
Construe as crime
Continuance,
All that changes
Confound with scorn.
So each man avenges
A child born.

The saints renounce life in the hope of triumphing over death:

O concreate
And never abandoned
Longing! Dilate
Our loves beyond
All loves that age
Or lust consumes,
O thirst and rage
For the lost kingdoms!

But this attempt to capture divinity outside of time is futile: “Whoever says / Divine has said / Dying.”

Life and death cannot be separated: this is the theme of “The Tree,” whose details are taken from the Adam and Eve myth. Once the first man and woman have eaten what they receive “from a serpent clasp of cold coils,” they lose their status as demigods in timeless Eden; they become aware of each other's sex, and “a sudden light” borders the tree with “a bright burnish of desire.” Now, like the incarnate god, they have become human; the woman has been “embraced by the lips with death's taste.” Debased to the human status, they are drawn into the process of nature:

From the living stem
Such sustenance
Draws into their dance
Stars follow them.
Clasping they control
The coursing light from pole to pole.

And, as with all life, the act of love and the act of death are inseparable. “All delight of leaf and sun / Dreams of dissolution.”

Bishop's own idea of true divinity is the subject of “Divine Nativity.” This poem plays with the idea of incarnation, the birth of the gods:

O fabled truth:
Did the god's bride
Know an armored youth
His bronze cast aside?

The Incarnation is both truth and fable, divine and human, flesh and spirit. The arrival of the gods is always linked with an outburst of sexual passion (“Adoring Leda leaned upon / A bright encumbrance of wild swan”). But, in whatever form they appear, the gods bring joy, hope, and rejuvenescence; and in this moment the animal, the human, and the divine are inextricably intermingled:

Eagle, swan or dove
White bull or cloud
Incarnate love
Alone is proud.
The arrogant know
In the bestial part
Overflow
Of the elated heart.

These poems compose Bishop's answer to the problem first posed to modern culture in The Waste Land, a work which also, it will be recalled, took its departure from Frazer and his pupil Jessie Weston. Eliot too uses the pattern of the vegetation myths as the controlling principle of order in his poem, but he already accentuates the Christian element—the idea of the self-sacrifice of the Dying God—as the source of the restoration of fertility. Bishop, on the other hand, takes a direction similar to D. H. Lawrence's in his emphasis on sexuality and his rejection of asceticism. But just as he had spiritualized the mindless sensationalism of the Lost Generation, so now he does not simply surrender to the deification of the primitive and chthonic powers. He refuses to abandon either the physical (“the bestial part”) or the spiritual (“the elated heart”), either to abstract man from nature or to submerge him in its tug. And the fine balance of Bishop's humanism, expressed in the firm control of these masterly poems, seems to me to entitle them to a distinguished place in contemporary poetry.

The same balance is maintained in Bishop's only published novel, Act of Darkness (1935), which takes on its full significance only in the context of the poems we have just discussed. As a novel, Act of Darkness suffers from an annoying technical flaw—an unexplained alternation between a first-person and a third-person narrator. But aside from this minor defect it is a vivid and memorable little work, written with a fine, fresh lyricism lacking in Bishop's earlier prose. At first sight it may seem merely another example of the American discovery-of-life genre, the awakening of an adolescent to the reality of evil (which, as in Sherwood Anderson's “I Want to Know Why,” is usually given a sexual guise). Bishop's originality, however, lies in his dissociation of sexuality and evil; it is rather the attempt to escape from sexuality, to evade the inevitable rites de passage into manhood and life, which here, as in the poetry, becomes the true evil.

The “act of darkness” referred to in the title (taken from Othello) is a rape, committed by the narrator's uncle. The action is seen largely through the eyes of the adolescent narrator, John; and this fateful outbreak of sexual dynamism—a dynamism that John also had felt stirring in himself—brings on a grave psychic crisis in the boy. John stifles his vitality and falls ill, unwilling to face the fact that life and manhood carry the possibility of both suffering and inflicting evil. But one day he finds himself wishing to die physically, rather than continue to linger in a twilight zone of death-in-life; and the spell of fear is broken. “Having accepted death, I returned to life.” And he seals his recovery by a visit to a brothel, where he himself experiences the ritual act of darkness—the initiation rites into the true religion of mankind—which prepares for the perils of manhood. But this experience also coincides with the discovery of Shakespeare, who teaches John that art can “impose a sensuous order on the moral disorder of the world.” Here again we find Bishop's acute awareness of the primitive roots of life going hand in hand with a sense of its need for aesthetic and human sublimation. Order and vitality belong together, else we get barbarism or desiccation.

VI

Bishop's Selected Poems contains a number of new items either written after Minute Particulars or, for some reason, not included in that volume. On the whole, however, these poems do not reveal any significant development in Bishop's work; only his accustomed mastery in familiar themes and styles. Bishop wrote little poetry between 1936 and 1940, but beginning in the latter year he had a remarkable spurt which produced some new poems of striking breadth and power and with a significant extension of thematic range. The death of his old friend F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1940 resulted in a moving threnody; and the events of the following years, particularly the fall of France, filled him with foreboding.

“The fall of France was a terrible shock to him; one was astonished at the violence of his reaction to it,” writes Edmund Wilson, whose own political isolationism presumably made him impervious to the catastrophe.⁶ But Bishop felt himself a son of Western culture to his very fingertips; and for him that culture was inconceivable without France. “I am dismayed,” he said in a speech delivered in 1941, “by the dangerous changes that may come to Western civilization and in the end destroy its continuity.” He enjoined the American artist, now that France was silent, to take up the French task of preserving this continuity. “We must find a way to reconcile our own past with the vast past of Western civilization.” With his own injunction as a guide, Bishop's last poetry meditates on the rise and fall of cultures, on destruction but also on rebirth. And its imagery, derived from the classical Mediterranean world he had always loved, reveals his own effort to fulfill the obligation he had laid on American art.

These meditations compose a group of poems, “The Statues,” unpublished in Bishop's lifetime and only made available in Allen Tate's edition of his poetry. Mr. Tate places their composition in 1940, but with no conclusive evidence; in any case, they obviously take up the theme of “The Divine Nativity” group. But instead of replacing the gods in the life-cycle of nature, as he had done earlier, Bishop now explores their relationship with human order and civilization. The sequence is based on a contrast between desert-imagery of space, drought, and barrenness (familiar from “The Saints”) and sea-imagery of time and destruction, but also of fecundation and reimmersion in the waters of life.

It is from the sea that the gods are born; but in the first poem they are “The Uneaten Gods,” cast up broken and drowned on a shore which is that of modernity. And so the sea, as it were, becomes desacralized (“Only the waves are seen … / Not the force under the waves, / Nor the forces above the waves”). Once the gods had been “embodiments of time”; and this was the birth of Greek civilization. In a magnificent passage, which recalls the neo-Hellenism of Schiller and Hölderlin, Bishop pictures this event:

                                        Imaginings of order
Rose, beyond the lucent headlands,
Above the marble stairs. And columns rose,
Voluptuous doves among the capitals,
Supporting and overcoming azure.
The gods stood. Men saw their simulacra
Display immortal visions. So let the wild
                                        white horses
Rise from the bay, and run, bestriding spindrift,
To rock the shores with stormier tramplings!
The gods stood. And while they stood, the state
And every sea-gaze circled to the same horizon,
All speech proclaimed one tongue of praise.

The following two poems, “Dunes on the March” and “Sojourn in the Desert,” show what occurs when the gods remain uneaten. The flowering shore of the sea becomes barren sand dunes “burning the vision / In excess of space.” But the sojourn in this desert could not give rise to any new flowering (“Ascetic drought was there … / But the saint's secret was not there”). Orpheus could not be reborn in this desolation, nor did “the haggard John / In his wild cloak of camel's hair” hear the Word in this desert. Only in “Return of the Sea” does life come again to the parched landscape—“Rushing as though water were the word / Death made flesh / The Word death / and the Word made flesh!”/

The poem “Statue of Shadow” is the most enigmatic of all: a vision of “that mystery of clearest light,” the shadow cast by the body at high noon on a coast of “burning sand.” In “Perspectives are Precipices,” Bishop had used “shadow” to symbolize human history and continuity. And what “shadow” seems to indicate here, following the rebirth of the return of the sea, is a recovery of the past and hence of the possibility of creating the future. “The shade of all those centuries / Whose death is longing and fate a crime / Lay long / But no longer / Than the statue of shadow / The sun at its silent noon laid at my feet.” And the last two poems, “The Great Statues” and “The Archipelagoes,” resolve the sequence in a recovery of serenity arising from this contemplation of past beauty and harmony and the conviction of its restoration in the future:

The day returns, but not the day
Of these gods. Yet the dawn resumes the amazed
Smile of a brute Apollo,
Dazzling in bronze of sea-encrusted blue-green.

“The Statues” still sees the rise and fall of cultures primarily in the perspective of the primordial rhythms of the “true religion of mankind.” But while the earlier poetry, inspired by the revolt against Puritanism, had concentrated on the incarnation of spirit, “The Statues” emphasizes, as it were, the spiritualization of nature and the flesh. Nature may now have only the lineaments of a “brute Apollo,” but total brutishness had forever been exorcised for those who preserve the continuity of Western culture. Nor are all cultures any longer dissolved into one; it is the culture and the gods of Greek humanism that have become the pattern for man. “The time-adorning monuments / Restore the secrets of eternity.” Considering the historical background of these poems—the rise and triumph of nazism, with its obscene worship of the fearsome gods of blood, race, and soil—it is hardly surprising that Bishop should have shifted his accents in this fashion.

And this new anthropocentrism is expressed even more clearly in his last important poem, “A Subject of Sea Change.” Here again we find the predominant sea-imagery of this last period. But the sea is now no longer simply the source of life; it has also become the paradoxical, ambiguous, Janus-faced image of history itself. The spectacle of the sea, writes the poet, allowed him “To hold in instant contemplation / The shifting flow of human history / That seaward sets even as it shoreward moves.”

In this poem Bishop directly expresses his trepidations about the fate of Western culture as he hears “the great bombs drop”; and he reminds his readers “That every ordered change of form / Brings mind's disorder and destroying storm.” But in face of the all-destroying flux, characteristically felt as a breakdown of manners (“Death greets us all without civility / And every color of the sea is cold”), a man must never fall below the noble image of himself immortalized by the Greeks. As with Oedipus, there is no escape from the responsibility of the tragic role in which he has been cast; but he must uphold human dignity to the end:

I must learn again the great part of Man—
Though the lines are scant that any man can speak—
Proclaiming with such passion as I can
The part first played, and nobly, by a Greek.
Time is man's tragic responsibility
And on his back he bears
Both the prolific and destroying years.
And so, I swear, he must surround each act
With scruples that will hold intact
Not merely his own, but human dignity.

These were John Peale Bishop's last words.

Notes

1. The Collected Poems of John Peale Bishop, ed. by Allen Tate (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948); The Collected Essays of John Peale Bishop, ed. by Edmund Wilson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948). All the poems and articles by Bishop cited in this essay are included in these two volumes.

2. R. P. Blackmur, “Twelve Poets,” The Southern Review VIII, 1 (Summer, 1941), 198.

3. Allen Tate, “John Peale Bishop,” The Man of Letters in the Modern World (New York: Meridian, 1955), p. 271.

4. Ibid., p. 275.

5. Ibid., p. 276.

6. Edmund Wilson, Introduction, The Collected Essays of John Peale Bishop, p. xiii.