Collecting Elizabeth Bishop

Abstract

This new collection of previously unpublished writing by Elizabeth Bishop is a welcome addition to her body of work, one which should appeal to the Bishop specialist and the general reader alike. Bishop was famously reluctant to publish anything that didn't meet her exacting standards: she often worked on poems for years or even decades, with the slightness of her literary output testifying to her unerring ability to distinguish between the finished and unfinished work. As anyone who has visited the Bishop archive at the Vassar College Library knows, however, the material deemed unfinished is both plentiful and fascinating. This collection of poems, drafts, and fragments culled from theVassar archive not only provides us with some poems certain to enter the Bishop canon but no less importantly illuminates Bishop's writing process and poetic ideals, yielding a wealth of new perspectives on the work she chose to publish during her lifetime. The appearance of this collection has sparked vigorous debate among Bishop's admirers, with some readers suggesting that, given Bishop's liter ary perfectionism, she would not have approved of its publication. Bishop's in England perhaps best expresses her ambivalence about the posthumous fate of her literary remains. Crusoe, contemplating the local museum's request for the remnants of his island sojourn-the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes, / my shedding goatskin trousers / (moths have got in the fur)-asks, can anyone want such things? (Complete Poems 166). Although Crusoe's relics occasion painful memories of ev eryday hardship (the knife there on the shelf// How many years did I / beg it, implore it, not to break?), the museum's request signifies the more general alienation Crusoe feels from his past as he is subsumed into its legend; he comments of his knife that it won't look at me at all. / The living soul has dribbled away.Through Crusoe Bishop conveys an acute