Essay: During her lifetime and over the last quarter of a century, Elizabeth Bishop's poetry has influenced many writers, especially in Ireland. To coincide with publication of a new edition of her 'Complete Poems', to which he has written an introduction, Tom Paulin assesses her life and work.
Elizabeth Bishop died 25 years ago. During her lifetime and over the last quarter of a century, her poetry has influenced many writers, especially in Ireland, where the formal authority and the subtlety of the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon often carries an invisible tribute to a poet who is often described as a poet's poet. Mahon's classic poem, 'A Disused Shed in Co Wexford', begins:
Even now there are places where a thought might grow -
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation.
The South American reference glances at the many poems Bishop wrote about Brazil, where she lived for 15 years. Mahon, like Bishop, is a poet who writes about dwelling in the world, but dwelling at a critical aesthetic distance, wary of what Beckett calls "accredited themes". Whenever I read Heaney's classic poem, 'Casualty', and Muldoon's classic 'Anseo', something in their grace and beauty, their deft sureness of foot, reminds me of Bishop.
In her letters, she writes warmly and admiringly of Heaney, and his wife, Maire, and to Irish poets whom she met. Bishop would sometimes identify her ancestry as "Scotch Irish" - a biographical fact it is important to know, as we trace that north/south theme in her work, a theme which many Irish readers hope will one day soon be laid to rest on this island.
It could be argued that after Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop is a central figure for northern Irish poetry (I'm sticking for the moment with that classification), but in the 1960s and early 1970s it was Robert Lowell who commanded the scene. He visited Ireland many times, and was married to a Northern Irish aristocrat (how strangely that sounds!), Caroline Blackwood. Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop were close friends, never lovers. Then one day, quite unexpectedly, he proposed to her. Wisely, she refused him and their friendship survived. Lowell admired her work enormously, and wrote very perceptively and sensitively about her poems - particularly that north/south theme. In his admiration for her work, there is a current of all-too-human anxiety: he is the most famous poet of their generation, indeed he is the dominant poet in the English-speaking world, but perhaps she is better than him?
It is invidious to set up hierarchies of talent, but reputations do change over time, as readers and critics - perhaps - grow wiser. In the 1960s and early 1970s, we all read Lowell, and it was only the disappointment of his three last volumes, The Dolphin, History, and For Lizzie and Harriet - that made me turn away from him. In Bishop's poetry, I recognised that "slow clock of condensation", as Mahon terms it - I recognised the theme of dwelling-in-the-world. When she wrote of "narrow provinces/of fish and bread and tea", I recognised those themes in Heaney, Mahon, and Muldoon. Her poetry, like theirs, teaches us to value the local, but not to be sucked into it - her cosmopolitanism speaks to those writers who like the Russian Acmeists discovered "a nostalgia for world culture".
Bishop begins her famous poem, 'The Moose', with that witty evocation of narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea and in it we can notice a vernacular aesthetic which, through Robert Frost and through her work, has been a great influence on Irish poetry. Frost admired Yeats, who defined poetry as "passionate speech", and in a few pages of seminal prose, Frost defined poetry as what he called "sentence sound". He wanted the natural, direct, intimate speaking voice brought into poetry, and that voice is there in everything Bishop wrote.
She now has the reputation of being one of the finest, one of the most formally perfect, poets of the second half of the 20th century. Heaney and Muldoon have testified in lectures and in essays on her poetry, to the unchallangeable subtlety of her work. And if she has been called a poet's poet - even a poet's poet's poet by John Ashbery - she is also pre-eminently a reader's poet, and a poet whom it is always a serious joy to teach - students come alive when asked to discuss her work, partly because she communicates with an eager, unforced directness, partly because of the wit, the sheer pizazz and style with which she writes.
In the 1980s, there was a certain resistance to her work: she never came out as a lesbian, refused to appear in all-women anthologies, guarded her privacy and did not take direct political stances like Lowell. She was seen as insufficiently political, a misreading of her work, which identifies with black Americans, and with the struggle of the poor and oppressed in South America. But she, wisely, does not draw attention to those themes. She designs beautiful cadences, perfect shapes, and then she runs a counter-theme against them: ugliness, bad taste, rough or broken surfaces and sounds infiltrate her paradise of pure form and make it both more ideal and more real.
In 'Cape Breton', she draws our attention to the weaving "silken water", and then offsets it with "hackmatack", the name of a hard American spruce much admired by Walt Whitman. She also introduces an "irregular nervous saw-tooth edge", and a "rough-adzed pole". A gifted amateur painter, she designs a composition which plays the rough against the smooth, and allows a coded unhappiness and anxiety to disturb the surface of her art .
Bishop's personal life was often unhappy - two lovers committed suicide - and she became an alcoholic as a young woman. Behind the formal facade of her poems, there is a homeless, orphaned imagination, whose loneliness was expressed in her insatiable letter-writing and in late-night phone calls to friends.
She was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 11th, 1911. Her mother was from Nova Scotia, her father, who was half Canadian, half American, died in 1911, eight months after she was born. Her mother became deeply disorientated over the next five years, was diagnosed as permanently insane in 1916 and died in a public sanatorium in Nova Scotia in 1934. Bishop lived alternately with her grandparents in Nova Scotia and New England, and later with an aunt. She had poor health and hadn't much formal education until she was 15. In 1930 she went to Vassar College and joined a brilliant generation there .
Bishop impressed everyone she met - she was musical, very well read, and was also a painter with a great knowledge of the visual arts. She was a compulsive traveller, who manages to avoid all the pitfalls of tourist verse.
The roots of Bishop's art can be traced to her undergraduate years at Vassar, and rather unusually it is to a single academic essay that we must turn to understand her idea of form and beauty. As an undergraduate she read a famous essay by the distinguished scholar, M.W. Croll. It is called 'The Baroque Style in Prose' and is one of the classic essays on prose style (it can be found in a collection of essays called The English Language, edited by George Watson). Croll's concept of baroque style - "not a thought, but a mind thinking" - spoke to Bishop like a vocation. She quoted Croll's essay in letters to friends, because what she admired in the baroque was the "ardour" and dramatic energy and immediacy of an idea as it was formulated and experienced. The result is a poetry of intense visual and vocal power, where the play of rhythm, rhyme, spoken inflection and carefully composed, sometimes abraded images, has a spontaneity and deft authority whose perfect cadences create that "unique feeling of timeliness" which she sought and admired in poetry.
We can see this is in 'Cape Breton' where she places against the rapid movement of the song-sparrow songs as they float upward "freely, dispassionately, through the mist" - the sudden short, heavily stressed line "in brown-wet, fine, torn fish-nets". It's this difference of movement and texture that makes Bishop such a continuously interesting and alive poet.
We can see her delight in rapidly changing tones and surfaces in one of her wittiest and most painterly poems, 'Seascape', where she describes "white herons got up as angels,/ flying as high as they want". She is making the picture baroque, and her delicate ear starts a run of ee sounds: the herons fly "in tiers and tiers of immaculate reflections". In the next line the word "region" picks up the ee sound, then hands it on to "bright green leaves edged neatly with bird-droppings".
The reason why Bishop appeals so strongly to fellow poets can be seen in that sudden uncomfortable word "edged", which brings in the idea of a margin and the marginal, as it abruptly breaks the pair of ee sounds in "green leaves", before letting the sound come back with emphasis in "neatly". The two ds in "edged" are echoed in "bird droppings" to design an uncomfortable, deliberately bad-taste moment. That moment of unease frays against the aesthetic surface she is designing, a surface she reasserts by transforming their faecal randomness into "illumination in silver". This use of images of discomfort and unease suffuses Seamus Heaney's poetry from Death of a Naturalist on - it is as though he has developed the ontological anxiety in her poetry into a form of social and political anxiety.
In Bishop, this tension between the aesthetic and a type of anti-aesthetic effect is one expression of her puritan upbringing - it introduces an anxiety into the delineation of a beautiful image, and this discomfiting effect then helps strengthen and make more flexible the particular aesthetic moment.
Bishop was also a gifted short story writer (her collected prose has been published), and she was also a marvellous translator. Many of her translations came out of the 15 years she spent in Brazil, where she moved in 1952 to live with Lota de Macedo Soares. She moved back to New York in 1967, and it was there that Lota committed suicide later that year.
Though Bishop continued to travel, she based herself in Boston and died there on October 6th, 1979. She is one of the greatest American poets of the last century, and is the subject of many books, essays and academic dissertations; 25 years after her death, her work is revered and admired more than ever.
Elizabeth Bishop: Complete Poems, with a new introduction by Tom Paulin, is published on Thursday by Chatto & Windus, £12.99