"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
Environmental Justice Witnessing in the Modernist Poetry of Lola Ridge, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Elizabeth Bishop
and subtle ways: non-residents participate in artificial landscapes without having tangible interaction with the actual landscape. Bishop writes in “Arrival at Santos,” And, warehouses, Some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue, And some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist, is this how this country is going to answer you and your immodest demands for a different world, and a better life, and complete comprehension of both at last, and immediately Warehouses, typical of ports and industrial living, greet Bishop instead of the lush landscape she expects based on her perception of the artificial landscape of foreign locales in general and Brazil in particular. The adjectives “feeble” and “uncertain” both point to a sense of dissatisfaction with what the country actually contains versus what the tourist expects. Bishop’s speaker includes herself as well the general population of 137 tourists when she addresses the tourist here. The “immodest demands for a different world” speak to the preconceptions of travel that manifest as an artificial landscape. No matter what awaits travelers, the artificial landscape makes a demand on their expectations, thus altering their reception of the landscape. Artificial landscapes exist, particularly abroad, because of the presence of what Nixon terms “racialized ecologies of looking,” which he defines as “the interconnected webs of looking and being seen in a context where the idea of the natural predominates” (194). The word “racialized” here indicates the inequality such looking reflects when seer and seen operate in a disproportionate power structure, such as when travelers from the Global North visit a country, like Brazil or the countries Nixon explores in Africa, that have been exoticized. Official and artificial landscapes are deliberately constructed in a way opposed to the organic nature of the vernacular landscape. Because of this artificiality, both the official landscape and the artificial landscape risk inaccuracy, biases, and injustice. In a chapter called “Stranger in the Eco-village: Race, Tourism, and Environmental Time,” Nixon writes, We need to explore what I call racialized ecologies of looking in relation to environmental amnesia. This environmental dynamic between seeing and not seeing, between remembering and forgetting, is forcefully exemplified by the game reserve. But it has a broader pertinence to the challenges of reconciling environmental justice, political transformation, biodiversity, and touristic expectations that have been shaped by the international marketing of nature. (176)
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.