"In a Room": Elizabeth Bishop in Europe, 1935–1937
We do not always remember that Elizabeth Bishop came of age as a writer during the rise of fascism, and that she composed a number of the poems for her first collection, North & South (1946), in Europe, as the Continent consciously prepared for world war. One reason we do not often connect her early work to such dramatic historical context is the late date of her first book: her poems had been appearing in major magazines for a decade when North & South was published. While a few scholars, notably James Longenbach and Betsy Erkkila, have begun to consider Bishop's early poetry within the political context of the 1930s, and to "locat[e] Bishop's work within the debates about the relation between literary modernism and the American and international Left[,]" the tendency of many critics has been to focus on what seem to be the purely aesthetic, apparently surrealist elements in Bishop's writing from the '30s and '40s, and to characterize her later work in Brazil, from the '50s and '60s, as a political awakening (Erkkila 285).1 At the same time, insightful biographical and psychoanalytic studies of her work sometimes downplay or overlook the impact of the larger, dramatic historical context in which she was writing her early poems.2 Here I want to consider more deeply the influence, on Bishop's early work, of the year and a half she spent in Europe shortly after college from July of 1935 to June of 1936, and from June to December of 1937 and to attend to the startling ways that three of her strange, early poems register contemporary anxieties about the development of fascism and militarism in Germany and Italy, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. Bishop's work has always resisted easy categorization, and it has been subject frequently to ahistorical readings. Bishop can be aptly discussed as a postmodernist poet, yet her early work can be considered late modernist; the aesthetic-political dilemmas of late modernism in the '30s were
Poetry And The Sense Of Panic. Critical Essays on Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery.
Lionel KELLY: Introduction: Poetry and the Sense of Panic. Mark FORD: Mont d'Espoir or Mount Despair: Early Bishop, Early Ashbery, and the French. Joanne FEIT DIEHL: Aggression and Reparation: Bishop and the Matter-Of-Fact. Benjamin COLBERT: Romantic Entanglements: Ashbery and the Fragment. Helen M. DENNIS: "Questions of Travel": Elizabeth Bishop and the Negative Sublime. Dennis BROWN: John Ashbery's "A Wave" (1983): Time and Western Man. Edward LARRISSY: "Is Anything Central?": Ashbery and the Idea of a Centre. Thomas TRAVISANO: Elizabeth Bishop and the Origins of Narrative Postmodernism. Krystyna MAZUR: The "Unfamiliar Stereotype": Repetition in the Poetry of John Ashbery. John PILLING: The "Hybrid Mix" of Ashbery's Three Poems, or, How Not to Be French. Peter ROBINSON: "The Bliss of What?" Cheryl WALKER: Metaphysical Surrealism in Bishop. Peter NICHOLLS: John Ashbery and Language Poetry. Geoff WARD: Before and After Language: The New American Poetry. Notes on Contributors. Index.
What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
Through journals, letters, dreams, and close readings of the work of many poets, Adrienne Rich reflects on how poetry and politics enter and impinge on American life. This expanded edition includes a new preface by the author as well as her post-9/11 "Six Meditations in Place of a Lecture."