The Lyric of Narrative: Exile, Poetry, and Story in Saint‐John Perse and Elizabeth Bishop

Abstract

This article examines two lyric rewritings of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Saint‐John Perse's Images à Crusoé focuses not on events or characters but on a series of physical objects that played a usually minor role in Defoe's novel. Saint‐John Perse transforms Defoe's moral tale into meditations on the emotional turmoil of difference and exile, as the narrative past becomes a lyric present that mourns the loss of an idyllic temporal and geographical space. Bishop's ‘Crusoe in England’ also recasts Defoe's tale in a series of ‘poetic’ tropes that fill in gaps in the novel. Her first‐person dramatic monologue – in contrast with Saint‐John Perse's prose poems in the second person – highlights the subjective experiences of fear, despair, and homoeroticism in the Crusoe story. Building from an analysis of the way books and texts themselves figure in both Saint‐John Perse's and Bishop's poems, I argue that the interaction of lyric and narrative traditions can thus forge a new literary space, namely, narrative prose filtered through the lyric tradition, that allow the experience of exile to be retold.