Verse as Deep Surface: Elizabeth Bishop’s New Poetics, 1938–39

Abstract

In years that have reading Elizabeth Bishop's poetry and scholarship that has grown up around it, two remarks stand out as almost uncannily apt. Bonnie Costello describes a poetics in which the self is projected into world and, conversely, mutable world enters domain of self. Bishop sees at threshold, along pane of glass (Elizabeth 60; my emphasis). Lorrie Goldensohn writes that playing in [Bishop's] work feels like a sympathy extending deeply and unnervingly everywhere (56). Both scholars are describing strangeness of a mind that somehow lacks usual membrane between itself and surrounding world. Put another way, it's a membrane that has become so porous, transparent, and extensive that it no longer bounds in usual way. In following pages will demonstrate that Bishop's idiosyncratic invention of a consciousness without skin arose as her solution to aesthetic problem of creating depth in poetry, a problem most intensively posed to her Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. Her unpublished poem Pleasure Seas, composed in 1938-39, provides us with an uncharacteristically explicit working out of problem and shows that Bishop began to consider surface of verse itself, writing on page, as a kind of threshold across which inner and outer worlds could pass. Bishop solves problem of depth imagining verse, nature, and mind as two-dimensional surfaces capable of opening out three-dimensionally into each other through complex relations of absorption, reflection, modulation, and resistance. The interior of self and a deep outer world pass through to one another via a skinless boundary, more like a sea surface than boundary of human body. In 1938 Marianne set problem of depth explicitly for her young protegee in a letter that Bishop's biographer Brett Millier considers may have most important single piece of criticism Elizabeth ever (137). wrote: can't help wishing you would sometime in some way, risk some unprotected profundity of experience; or since no one admits profundity of experience, some characteristic private defiance of significantly detestable. (391) The letter marks a particularly sensitive moment in a sequence of interchanges in evolving dynamic between two poets. (1) As Costello has argued, by confronting Bishop with aesthetic and moral principles [Moore] forced young poet to consider her own artistic decisions on a larger scale (Marianne Moore 137). Dated May 1, 1938, letter was received Bishop during period crucial for her transition to a poetics that moved beyond her more introspective, fantastic poems (Kalstone 61-75; Travisano 19, 56; Page 206). In 1930s climate of pressure to write a more politically engaged poetry, urged Bishop to turn, as older poet herself had, to deeper moral and metaphysical Christian critique of culture provided Reinhold Niebuhr, or some similar moral critique (private defiance of significantly detestable). (2) But although Bishop admired Niebuhr and read some of his work, she could not finally rely on Christian metaphysics to provide a ground or create depth for her work. Bishop felt May 1, 1938, letter as an attack. In fact, herself uses term in a handwritten addendum at bottom of typed letter: Don't interrupt yourself to answer this deference & attack (Bishop, Papers). In her reply Bishop tells that she has been having some this morning on subject of letter, where meditations has a seventeenth-century Protestant aura of severe self-scrutiny (One Art 73). The self-doubt that Moore's letter engendered can be felt in fact that in her reply Bishop asks point-blank whether it is worth her while to go on writing poems: I wish sometimes you would tell me quite frankly if you think there is any use--any real use--in my continuing with them. …