Abstract
Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry has won the admiration of a number of Christian poets and scholars. This essay argues that one reason for this is Bishop’s subtle engagement with the work of the poet-divines Gerard Manley Hopkins and, especially, George Herbert; through their influence, she enters into the guiding western poetic tradition of the meditative lyric, which is rooted in the Platonic and Christian accounts of the human person as an image of the Triune God in virtue of the mind as a trinity of memory, understanding, and will. Bishop practiced poetry as a moral act open to a divinity it cannot account for or even name, but traces of whose significance run through the world her poems depict. By considering her work, and her poem “The Weed” in particular, in the context of Herbert, the historical studies of Louis L. Martz, and the literary theory of Yvor Winters, we see that Bishop the unbeliever cannot properly be understood as a “secular” poet, but as one who recognizes the meditative lyric as a way of arriving at understanding of a truth that transcends us.
Highlights
Over the last few years, I have noticed that a number of Christian poets and scholars of Christianity seem to harbor a particular affection for the work of Elizabeth Bishop, and that they do so for reasons tied to their religious beliefs
Gioia may be America’s best-known living Catholic poet, his work in prose and verse has, until recently [1], shied away from any such title, and he has written that Bishop influenced him in her unwavering commitment to the self-effacement of the artist engaged in craft, in making a good poem
Bishop maintains and develops its conventions through a close but uneven engagement with those roots—above all, as they are expressed in the devotional poetry of George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins [12,13,14,15]
Summary
Over the last few years, I have noticed that a number of Christian poets and scholars of Christianity seem to harbor a particular affection for the work of Elizabeth Bishop, and that they do so for reasons tied to their religious beliefs. Bishop maintains and develops its conventions through a close but uneven engagement with those roots—above all, as they are expressed in the devotional poetry of George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins [12,13,14,15] As a nonbeliever she found resources in the devout Christian poetic of those two predecessors and she adapted their meditative practices to an end that is less than true contemplation but more than merely what I shall call therapeutic self-reflection. I shall conclude with a reflection on what it means for her meditative lyrics to be moral rather than devotional acts so as to make clear that, while they can only be called Christian insofar as they draw ambivalently on Christianity’s intellectual vision and moral concerns, it does not illuminate the character of her work to call it “secular” in the familiar modern sense of the refusal of anything that transcends temporal life in this world.. To be secular means to think only in terms of what is immanent to us in space and time, i.e., in this world for about a hundred years (a century), and so to refuse to think in terms of what is spiritually or historical transcendent of that low horizon
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