Elizabeth Bishop's social conscience.

In "Contradictions: Tracking Poems," the long sequence that makes up the second half of Your Native Land, Your Life, Adrienne Rich meditates on Elizabeth Bishop's late villanelle, "One Art":

acts of parting trying to let go without giving up yes Elizabeth a city here a village there a sister, comrade, cat and more no art to this but anger.(1)

"The art of losing isn't hard to master," Bishop said, and Rich's response to the line cuts two ways. On the one hand, she admires Bishop's artistry, feeling that she herself has not mastered the art - "only badly-done exercises." On the other hand, Rich is uncomfortable with Bishop's reticence, preferring the anger of the badly-done to the artistry of a villanelle.

Although Bishop has always been championed by male poets - from Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell to John Ashbery and Mark Strand - she has (until recently) presented a difficult example to female poets, especially those of Rich's generation. In an essay on Bishop written around the same time as "Contradictions," Rich explained that for a long time she "felt drawn, but also repelled" by Bishop's poetry. "Miss" Bishop - that is, Bishop as she was championed by Lowell - was part of the problem.

Women poets searching for older contemporaries in that period [of the 1940s and 1950s] were supposed to look to "Miss" Marianne Moore as the paradigm of what a women poet might accomplish, and, after her, to "Miss" Bishop. Both had been selected and certified by the literary establishment, which was, as now, white, male, and at least ostensibly heterosexual. Elizabeth Bishop's name was spoken, her books reviewed with deep respect. But attention was paid to her triumphs, her perfections, not to her struggles for self-definition and her sense of difference. In this way, her reputation made her less, rather than more, available to me.(2)