Readers admire Robert Lowell, entertain a fondness for Marianne Moore, respect Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot, become fanatics, a few of them, over Ezra Pound, even compete to join the cult of Sylvia Plath, but they fall helplessly in love, over and over, with Elizabeth Bishop. In the markets of reputation, the past quarter-century has seen the rise of a poet considered by some of her peers as frivolous, whimsical, even trivial. Why has our age become so enamored of a poet who almost to the end of her life required a special taste?

Though she was praised by Lowell and Randall Jarrell, Bishop’s early reviews were less lavish than those lavished on others (“bizarre fantasies,” said one critic of her poems). She later won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but never campaigned for literary recognition and spent almost half her adult life in Brazil. (Those who hate the hoopla of the literary world find that absence makes the hearts of other writers grow fonder—if they don’t forget you entirely.) For a long while, she lived in the shadow of Marianne Moore, who befriended the young poet and commented on her work; Bishop adapted, in her own shy, cross-purposed way, Moore’s quirky gift for description but for a long while was seen as a minor disciple of a poet more original and odd.

The future may appreciate our age for poetry we despise rather than poetry we love. Having better taste than we do, the future usually has the good sense to judge an age by its one or two poets of genius (if you have four or six, you’re living in 1600 or 1820—that is, a golden age), while cheerfully and cruelly ignoring the hundreds who gratified the taste of the day. What would American poets of 1875 have thought, could they have peered into a glass and seen that, before a few decades had passed, their age would be known only for that great American poseur, Walt Whitman, and some unknown spinster from Amherst?

Bishop adapted, in her own shy, cross-purposed way, Moore’s quirky gift for description but for a long while was seen as a minor disciple of a poet more original and odd.

Readers adore Bishop and adore themselves for adoring her. She never found writing easy, one reason non-writers like her—an artist who must plod toward genius bears the mark of humanity (Beethoven is human, Mozart only divine). After her mid-thirties, she finished fewer than two poems a year; and her papers contain notebook after notebook and file after file of poems in fragmentary or unfinished form—some just dust heaps of phrases, others roughly glued into shape, some dragged through numerous frustrating drafts, and a few that seem to lack nothing but the poet’s approval. Since Bishop scholars have mined this trove haphazardly, readers will be grateful to find the best of this raw material gathered by Alice Quinn, poetry editor of The New Yorker.¹

The deceptive ease of Bishop’s poems conceals her trouble in finishing them—she worked hard to make them fresh and offhanded, as if they hadn’t been written at all. (She’s hardly the first artist to use great labor to make labor look easy.) When she was stuck, she would pin a poem to her bulletin board and wait for the right word to come along. Sometimes this was a very long wait. “The Moose” took a quarter-century to finish; and “12 O’Clock News,” finally published in the Seventies, was started at Vassar forty years before. Her letters are littered with references to poems just begun or half done, poems she wanted to include in her next book or dispatch to a dedicatee; but months and years piled up while such poems were abandoned, revisited, abandoned once more.

City Stars

Perishable, adorable friends,
each sometimes ends.

No rhyme to it at all
and not less of reason.
The miles of dirty air—
it’s dim, but one is there,
and there’s another, fairly bright
white, or is it a jet?
They’re there, they’re there.

From a distance, it’s hard to imagine what she found wrong with such lines. The editor has printed the poems partly in draft form, with the messiness a copy-editor would have tidied up. The good argument for this (it reminds us the poems never received the poet’s imprimatur) goes only so far, since the defects (punctuation gone astray, lines hovering between two or three phrases) make it hard to see the poem plain. (I have added clarifying punctuation and capitals, here and elsewhere, and made minor adjustments.) For a lonely child, the stars might invite the same longing for intimacy as the mute toy-horse in “Cirque d’Hiver.” (“City Stars” seems related to various big-city poems, like “The Man-Moth,” that Bishop began in the Thirties while living in New York just after college.) The stars are one more example in Bishop of the beautiful concealed by dross—her version of the ugly-duckling theme. That final line insists the stars are there, after all; but beneath it lies a mother’s soothing there there, there there—Bishop was good at reassurance cut with desperation.

Often bedridden as a child, wheezing with asthma or coughing from bronchitis, Bishop was shuffled from house to house and relative to relative after her father died and her mother went insane. A shuttlecock between warring sides of the family, Bishop felt that she was “always a sort of a guest.” She was sent in the end to the stark and forlorn apartment of an aunt and uncle, in a poverty not at all genteel.

Her early poems, stuffed with allegories and fables, betray too close a reading of George Herbert—sometimes she seems a Metaphysical, Third Class. (Her juvenilia here show she hadn’t yet learned to trust her instincts—worse, she didn’t know she had instincts.) Yet a poem like “Sestina,” with its mournful old woman and trusting granddaughter, today appears painfully autobiographical; we know so much more now about Bishop’s life, it’s easier to see, as in Eliot, where the personal wormed into the poetic. Even in Worcester, Massachusetts, the child found small, obscure delights—the pansies on the back porch every spring; the two canaries, Sister and Dickie; even the quarreling neighbors. She turned the ordinary into an Aladdin’s cave of wonders because she had to.

Bishop’s poems, as aesthetic organizations, often look ruefully toward the past or reinvent the present in fabulous terms. There are sorrows available in both. This was written in her twenties:

The past
at least
is polite:
it keeps out of sight.

The present
is more recent.
It makes a fuss
but is unselfconscious.

The future
sinks through water
fast as a stone,
alone alone.

After she had rejected a boyfriend who had twice proposed, he shot and killed himself, having first sent her a postcard that read, “Elizabeth, Go to hell.” Her lovers thereafter were not always women, though in her late thirties, as far as her biographer can tell, Bishop accepted what was probably always her inclination (she had fallen in love with her Vassar roommate). The small legacy her father left could never support her in New York; through her thirties she moved around restlessly, looking further and further away for a home. In 1951, during a stop in Brazil on a cruise around South America, she suffered an allergic reaction to cashews. While recovering, she fell in love with Lota de Macedo Soares, the aristocratic Brazilian with whom she would share a long domestic contentment, but who also committed suicide.

reader searches the poems in vain for this romantic life—there are gestures or counter-gestures of affection, but rarely do you feel the disruptions of passion. (Bishop wasn’t careful or even faithful in love—the beautiful villanelle “One Art” is almost an apology for all the unwritten love poems.) A few poems in the archives live on the remembered edge of sex; but they seem oddly uncomfortable with physical desire, the poems suppressed not perhaps because of what they revealed (homosexual poets of Bishop’s generation sometimes still couched love for one sex in terms of the other), but because of the sentiment lurking there. Bishop’s reticence had little room for sentiment, and less for immodesty.

Poets with a perfectionist streak are often depressives. (This is not to say that misery loves poetry, though it does.) When you read Bishop’s letters, you wonder how—alcoholic, asthmatic, living in clouds of unhappiness—she finished anything at all. The poems are a triumph over what the false starts and dead ends succumbed to. The perceiving squint that attracted Bishop in Marianne Moore’s descriptions, where its origins lay in an eccentricity squeezed into whalebone-bodiced propriety, alters the ordinariness that surrounds and imposes upon depression, the commonplace touched with Ovidian metamorphosis.

Off to the left, those islands, named and renamed
so many times now everyone’s forgotten
their names, are sleeping.

Pale rods of light, the morning’s implements,
lie in among them tarnishing already,
just like our knives and forks.

Because we live at your open mouth, O Sea,
with your cold breath blowing warm, your warm breath cold,
like in the fairy tale.

Not only do you tarnish our knives and forks
—regularly the silver coffee-pot goes into
dark, rainbow-edged eclipse;

the windows blur and mirrors are wet to touch.
[“Apartment in Leme”]

How often Bishop liked to observe sleepers—you cannot quarrel with a sleeper. These islands off Rio become part of a domestic scene estranged from its usual identities—the islands renamed into erasure, the coffee-pot eclipsed by its own tarnish. In her poems, no identity is safe.

Her childhoods, imagined or real, are flecked with sadness, sometimes even besieged by it. (She once said that families were like “concentration camps.”) There’s a childlike naiveté to her poems—Bishop is the best American poet on childhood and the least sentimental about it; yet the comforts taken there, comforts she enjoyed too rarely, can be touched with the morbid:

For M. B. S., Buried in Nova Scotia

Yes, you are dead now and live
only there, in a little, slightly tip-tilted graveyard
where all of your childhood’s Christmas trees are forgathered
with the presents they meant to give,
and your childhood’s river quietly curls at your side
and breathes deep with each tide.

The matter-of-fact opening, the comical “tip-tilted graveyard,” like one a child might draw, lures us into a poem where death is childhood lived over, more happily; the poem might be callous without the last lines, which make death, too, a consolation—the river curls against the dead woman like a dog at the feet of a knight on a medieval tomb. (I have changed “present” to “presents” on the authority of another draft.)

These poems brought so near perfection (a dozen are as good as all but her best work) make us lament Bishop’s too critical eye, but others exist only as fragments or pipe dreams, without the will to become poems. The failures explain more about Bishop’s talents than the successes—she worked by accretion, stumbling through early drafts by phrase or fancy (often you see her characteristic gestures without their magic), trying to get at the resistant matter of the poem. She must have asked herself if these really were poems (she worried about her “cuteness” and her “exotic or picturesque” details)—we love them now because they’re like no one else’s. It was, in the end, their irregularity, their off-balance tilt, that made her poems poems. Jarrell and Lowell, among others, saw how much moral brooding and unsettling vision lay beneath their glittering surfaces. No wonder she found it impossible to write criticism—the critical restrictions of period taste were what she was trying to escape. Self-doubt is not the least attractive of her vulnerabilities.

Certain memories haunted her, cast and recast over the years as she tried to find the form nascent there. When most subservient to memory, she fell into the rambling narrative of poems like “The Moose” and “In the Waiting Room.” The crucial moment of self-awareness in the latter poem (“you are an I,/ you are an Elizabeth”), a symbol on its way to becoming a joint-stock company, has given critics a field day, though it’s one of her few false moments. Her troubled memories are less affecting than ones where despair, as in “Sestina,” is half suppressed beneath her playful manner. A poet, over time, discovers different ways to write a poem, ways, once discovered, often hard to change—most poets never learn more than three or four. What we see in her drafts is how often Bishop tested her routines; if there were failures, they were the price of her successes.

It was, in the end, their irregularity, their off-balance tilt, that made her poems poems.

Reading through her collected poems, you marvel at how often she succeeded (great poets commit their share of mediocre sins; but some with a peculiar limitation of means—like Eliot and Auden—write, at least for a while, almost nothing but masterpieces). If she knew intuitively what made her poems work, should these drafts and fragments have been left unpublished? At their deaths, Shelley, Housman, and many another left lovely poems in rough draft (the entire works of Wyatt, Traherne, and Dickinson, which remained in manuscript, might have vanished into a kitchen fire). It would be criminal, by whatever statutes apply, to leave in dusty archives poems so touched with mournful knowledge, with the sense of a life sometimes wrongly spent.

A great and early sunset,
a classic of its kind, went unobserved,
although today the sun himself swerved
as far out of his course as he could get,

taking the opportunity
to see things that he might not see again;
letting the shadows poke their fingers in
and satisfy their curiosity.

Now, down below,
the darkness-level rises in the valley.
In the small tip-tilted town already
those gold cats’ whiskers show

where six streets lie.
[“St. John’s Day”]

Bishop’s calm powers conspired here toward a majesty of observation (think of Wordsworth on Westminster Bridge, but with her nervous comic touches)—and, then, as if she didn’t know how to go on, the poem straggles forward a couple of stanzas and loses its way. The volume has many gorgeous beginnings that come to nothing in the end. (That shyly absurd adjective “tip-tilted” tries again, and in vain, to sneak into a poem she could publish.)

Alice Quinn’s thoughtful editing has returned these poems to the density of their histories. Full of quotations from Bishop’s memoirs, notebooks, and letters, the notes set the poems into the life surrounding these interrupted and abandoned works. The fragmentary memoirs included in the appendix form a major autobiographical supplement to Bishop’s childhood, which they treat with more depth and less critical posturing than Brett Millier’s workmanlike biography, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (1993). Unfortunately, it takes only Bishop’s stray mention of rain or lime trees or graveyards for the editor to throw in everything the poet said on the subject—some notes are so long you feel you’re being punished.

Despite long immersion in Bishop’s work, the editor has found it difficult to order or date these drafts (the fonts of the poet’s apostolic succession of typewriters have proved of some help); but Quinn’s editorial decisions are never doctrinaire—her affectionate tone is among the pleasures of this edition. Like most editors, she misses a trick or two—she doesn’t mention, for example, the relation between some draft lines and Bishop’s lovely “Cirque d’Hiver,” or between others and “Sleeping Standing Up” and “Filling Station” (and surely it’s odd to say that a poem is “terribly prescient” about the death, twenty years later, of a lover Bishop hadn’t even met yet). Some of the editor’s judgments bewilder me—I don’t see why the prose and poetry in the appendix lack notes (or why the villanelle “Verdigris” is placed there rather than in the body of the book). Some drafts have been printed in photographic facsimile, which lets us see how the pages looked to the poet; yet these often lack transcriptions. These are minor flaws in a book that will be indispensable to readers of Bishop.

Bishop’s life was a series of frustrations, tragedies, accidents—the extraordinary was her only means of disabling the terrors of the ordinary.

Readers who bother to read acknowledgments may notice my name. In 1992, while spending an afternoon in the archives at Vassar, I first saw many of these poems. I approached her publisher with the idea of an edition of unfinished poems. Though initially encouraging, after seeing a draft manuscript he decided not to pursue the idea, which by then conflicted with other plans. Some years later, the project was revived. Alice Quinn started from scratch, though she saw the draft of my labors, and pursued a very different and far more inclusive idea for the collection.

Having scoured the archives, Quinn has perhaps included too many drafts that barely escape their fragmentary phrases—that’s the risk when an editor loves a poet’s work (lovers want to see every scrap, even the laundry lists). If it is a flaw, it’s better than the vices to which editing is sometimes prey. Is there anything left after so thorough a trawl? At least two poems, I think.

Newsreel

smuts floating from an unsnuffed lamp,
two cinders; we got used to them.
We rubbed them in our eyes to weep
for man drawn up in igneous cramp,
the posture of those burnt asleep,
a man burnt up alive asleep.

In the country movie hall
many of the hard seats go
down too far or not at all.
An unremarking hierarch
steers us to a middle row.
In draughty interrupted dark
we sit and wish for darker dark.

The oddly italicized opening is similar to the italicized close of “The Armadillo,” which has often troubled readers. (Is there a change in emphasis or a change in speaker?) The horrors of Pompeii, the igneous cramp of the dead, are those of the photographs of bodies piled at Dachau. The wistfulness in the last line contains something like hope, but something like horror, too—as if the only moral response were not to see at all. Oedipus reacted to horror in that way.

Bishop’s poems were so modestly disposed, so full of delightful and startling images, like a tray of weird candies, it’s hard to say just where their fragility, so similar to Dickinson’s, sinks into something darker, more frantic, less in control:

Bicycles

The bicycle riders
work like insects,
each bicycle
a pair of spiders,

each wheel filled
solid silver,
buckets of water
swing unspilled.

Each gray wing
held by webs
slips to and fro,
kept from flying

by the wheels:
a pair of spiders;
they’ve caught the wings,
they’ve caught the riders,

bent on tiny seats,
spinning two webs
at the same time spinning
long threads in the streets.

Something about Bishop makes readers feel proprietary—Shakespeare and Milton are everyone’s property, but Hardy and Larkin and Bishop each reader’s alone. Her vulnerability, her charming chaos (even when complete, the poems feel fragmentary, like her personality), were not overcome but succumbed to—she lacks that seriousness, that pretentiousness in the poet’s lingua franca, that in Lowell, Jarrell, and Berryman now seems leaden, done by union rule for union wages. Bishop emerges from this book a more personal poet, the made surfaces of her poems concealing the disorder from which they were made. In “‘The past … ,’” “City Stars,” “‘From the shallow, night-long graves … ,’” “The Street by the Cemetery,” “The Salesman’s Evening,” “Key West,” “‘Don’t you call me that word, honey … ,’” “For M. B. S., Buried in Nova Scotia,” “Suicide of a Moderate Dictator,” “St. John’s Day,” “Foreign-Domestic,” “All Afternoon the Freighters—Rio,” “Mimosas in Bloom,” “Apartment in Leme,” “Salem Willows,” “Just North of Boston,” “Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle,” and in dozens of fragments, there is a Bishop we recognize and a Bishop we do not quite know. Readers will remember some of these poems as long as they read her.

Bishop’s life was a series of frustrations, tragedies, accidents—the extraordinary was her only means of disabling the terrors of the ordinary. This makes more affecting the transfigurations in “A Miracle for Breakfast” and “Filling Station,” the metamorphosis of her desk in “12 O’Clock News” and of the view out her window in “The Bight.” That our age remains in love with a poet of such reticence and tact, one often frustrated by her gifts, is as much a mark of the age’s intelligence as of its mawkishness. (There there, there there, readers seem to say over her wounds.) Her make-believe world, so like Joseph Cornell’s boxes, can be too perfectly self-contained; perhaps the childlike awe was put on, after a while—yet Bishop was so afflicted by self-doubt, it’s hard to believe it became merely a mannerism. And, if it did, there are worse forms of insincerity.