The Dailiness of Her Center: Elizabeth Bishop's Late Poetry

Abstract

Robert von Hallberg opens his book about contemporary American culture poetry saying he will discuss the variety of excellent poems written in recent decades about what poets have taken to be the range of thought and experience most central to American life (1). He defines the center as synonymous with public life, social institutions, authority, and national spirit, and he lists examples of poems his study excludes, because they do address this center. Elizabeth Bishop's One Art, her 1976 villanelle about the loss of love, is one such poem; it does not relate directly to my subject (2). Bishop would have been the first to agree with his definition of the center. She wrote to Robert Lowell, after reading Life Studies, that I am green with envy of your kind of assurance. I feel that I could write in as much detail about my Uncle Artie, say but what would be the significance? Nothing at all. He became a drunkard, fought with his wife, and spent most of his time fishing . . . and was ignorant as sin. It is sad; slightly more interesting than having an uncle practising law in Schenectady maybe, but that's all. Whereas all you have to do is put down the names! And thal fact that it seems significant, illustrative, American, etc., gives you, I think, the confidence you display about tackling any idea or theme, seriously, in both writing and conversation. In some ways you are the luckiest poet I know!2 Lowell's poetry had access to America's cultural veins simply because he had familial roots in American poetic and political history. Bishop, on the other hand, was an orphan of unimportant stock, off in Brazil at the time of this letter; hers was the eye of the outsider, as Adrienne Rich put it,3 or so Bishop projects it here.