Elizabeth Bishop's Surrealist Inheritance

Abstract

OME of the enchanted mystery which permeates Elizabeth Bishop's i3 poetry arises from her preoccupation with dreams, sleep, and the borders between sleeping and waking. Her poems contain much of the magic, uncanniness and displacement associated with the works of the surrealists, for she too explores the workings of the unconscious and the interplay between conscious perception and dream. Although she draws very little from the surrealists' extreme experiments in technique, she does inherit the liberating bequest of their imaginative breakthroughs, and in an original and unobtrusive manner, she assimilates various surrealist aspirations into her poetic practice. In an attempt to escape the censoring power of reason and to delve directly into the unconscious, the surrealists developed several techniques for composition which emphasized spontaneity and chance. Automatic writing was praised by Breton as an innovative method for bypassing conscious control and probing the divine disorder. Collage, exemplified in Lautreamont's fortuitous encounter upon a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella, was defined by Max Ernst as a meeting of two distant realities on a plane foreign to them both.1 It too became a favorite surrealist device because it sabotaged rational connections by allowing for the haphazard intrusion of surprise relationships. These dissociating excursions into automatic writing and collage reoriented poetic possibility for expressing the ineffable powers of the unconscious through a radical, openended poetry freed from the normal confines of logical structure and the limits of a conscious personality. Although Bishop shares the surrealists' interest in the unconscious, her methods for incorporating oneiric qualities into her poetry differ