As two most prominent women poets of their generations in United States, Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich embody sharply contrasting attitudes toward poetry and its cultural roles. Most critics have tended to approach Bishop as an aesthete, essentially private in her concerns and vision, while viewing Rich as an activist, strongly committed to use of poetry as an instrument of social change.(1) The facts of case are not quite so neat, however. Rich's early poetry explores much of same thematic terrain as Bishop's - domesticity, travel, memory - and even in its later phases her work continues to take individual experience as base from which to mount its political critiques. Conversely, as a number of critics have shown, including Rich herself and most recently Betsy Erkkila, Bishop's poetry is far from indifferent to issues of social and economic justice.(2) The real locus of difference between them, I want to argue, is not politics but history. The two poets disagree not so much over questions of action as questions of knowledge, which necessarily precede and inform action. More specifically, they disagree over extent to which poet is capable of gaining unmediated access to truth of history, even when that history may be suppressed, silenced, or submerged. Two of their most familiar and oft-anthologized poems - Bishop's At Fishhouses and Rich's Diving Into Wreck - reveal some surprising affinities of trope and language while casting into relief fundamental differences between poets, which revolve around questions of knowledge, history, and, in a key metaphor for both poems, immersion. Most prominently, both poems allegorize sea as a medium of pure knowing wholly distinct from compromised, constructed world above. Bishop famously says of icy water off Nova Scotia that It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, / drawn from cold hard mouth / of world, derived from rocky breasts / forever, and drawn, and since / our knowledge is historical, and flown (66). Historical in this final line assumes a double meaning: Our knowledge is necessarily historical inasmuch as it occurs in time and is therefore subject to transience of all temporal things, flowing and flown; but it is also knowledge of history, of lives and events that precede our own and give it meaning. Thus history of this particular Nova Scotia fishing village proves to be closely bound up with Bishop's own painful childhood and its formation of her present self. The old man speaker meets near water a friend of my grandfather, she tells us, and like ancient wooden capstan with its melancholy stains, like dried blood, his presence speaks of a past beyond recovery. We talk of decline in population, she reports dryly, her euphemistic language failing to obscure that real subject of their conversation is death - her grandfather's included, as was in preceding line poignantly attests.(3) Rich's allegory is no less clear-cut than Bishop's, but she is not quite as explicit in her association of sea with knowledge, choosing at first to characterize it by negation: the sea is another story / sea is not a question of power / I have to learn alone / to turn my body force / in deep element (Fact 163). The world of sun-flooded schooner with its sundry equipment of ladders, knives, books, and masks is governed, like human world at large, by will to power, effort to master and subjugate one's environment. But sea does not yield to such efforts, requiring a different approach, gradual, patient, without force. As becomes clear in course of poem, this is because sea marks a dimension beyond reach of change, action, or intervention. Like memory, sea preserves traces of past traumas that can only be inspected, acknowledged, and laboriously brought to light, never revised or effaced. …