Elizabeth Bishop's Lyric Vision

Abstract

Peggy Samuels’s Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art analyzes the art of lyric suspension and documents Bishop’s involvement in the museum world of the 1930s and ’40s, demonstrating that Bishop’s aesthetics were deeply influenced by Paul Klee’s paintings, Kurt Schwitters’s collages and Alexander Calder’s mobiles. Bishop took from these artists the concept of a lyric subjectivity suspended between surface and depth. Samuels’s account places Bishop in the sister arts tradition, showing that the modulation and layering that distinguish Bishop’s poetry can be traced to experiments with flatness, perspective and movement in the visual arts. Samuels explores the epistemological, ontological, ethical and aesthetic implications of Bishop’s lyric suspensions.