Authors
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
Bibliography
Biography
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
Robert Lowell and Bishop were close friends and correspondents throughout their careers. By the early 1960s, they were being lauded by critics as leaders in postwar American verse, renovating a New England poetic tradition that stretched back, through Frost, Robinson, Dickinson, and Emerson, to Bradstreet. In temperament, however, they could hardly have been more different. Emotionally unstable, Lowell was a figure of public self-torment, an artist who favored dramatic shifts in form and voice and insurrections against previous identities; Bishop, by contrast, was famous for her reserve, for understatement, for self-concealment in her verse, and for refusing the "confessional" mode that Lowell joined and helped to lead in the last fifteen years of his life. In contemporary literary histories, these poets are often spoken of as a pair--not merely for their long friendship but also for certain perceived similarities in what they attempted to do as artists. In reading these poets together, we need to consider whether their achievements are complementary, fundamentally at odds, or in some other relationship to one another.
1. Lowell's Skunk Hour (1959) is dedicated to Bishop; Bishop's The Armadillo (1965) is dedicated to Lowell. Lowell introduces the skunks in line 37, toward the end; Bishop's armadillo also doesn't appear until near the end of her poem. Aside from the fact that these poems are both "about" small mammals, what connects them thematically? Why are these animals here at all?
2. Bishop's In the Waiting Room (1976) is in part about Bishop's puzzlement about her own identity, about the confinements and imprint of family and tradition. Compare this poem to Lowell's My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow, in which Lowell, about five years old, thinks about his ancestors, former homes, and life and death. Compare the tone of these poems and the kinds of details that are gathered into them. Compare the endings as well, in both form and effect.
3. Bishop's Over 2,000 Illustrations (1955) and Lowell's For the Union Dead (1964) both look at ways of remembering -- Bishop peruses an illustrated and annotated Bible; Lowell looks at Civil War monuments. In each poem, what is the effect of this indirectness, this mediated experience of the past?
4. Bishop's Over 2,000 Illustrations ends with "infant" looking. Why? Lowell's For the Union Dead opens with himself as a young child, looking at fish through the glass of the city aquarium. Why does he begin there?