"A Poet's Poet's Poet"? Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79).(Literature)

FOR MANY YEARS, Elizabeth Bishop's name was overshadowed by that of Robert Lowell (1917-77), an altogether noisier, more controversial poet. Yet despite her 1956 Pulitzer Prize, it was he who seemed to garner most of the awards, the invitation to read at the White House (which he famously turned down), the publication by Faber, the major biography from Ian Hamilton ... When he died, however, interest in his poetry declined rapidly and it would be a quarter of a century before there was a Collected Poems. But as Robert Lowell's star set, his dear friend Elizabeth Bishop's began to rise dramatically, although she did not outlive him by long, and her reputation now is considerably higher than his. There will probably be as many young poets now (and not only Americans) who name her as "chief influence" as once named Lowell.

Where Lowell took his inspiration from history, Bishop takes hers from geography. There is in fact something of Wordsworth about the way she attends to the outer world in order to appease the inner. Lowell (who elsewhere drew parallels with Dorothy and William in their relationship) envied her this ability, and rightly so.

Bishop's poetic marked the way forward for American verse more than Lowell's: his "confessional" mode was exhausted; his "twelve-tone" late style was inimitable. Elizabeth Bishop's open, relaxed, inclusive manner is the one that has become the "Pamassian" for contemporary American verse and has coloured the work of poets from South Wales to New South Wales. Many have discovered in the process just how hard that apparent ease is to achieve.

What appeals internationally in Bishop's writing is, I think, the fact that she is in search of home, rather than trying to escape from its clutches. Even her Crusoe is eager to tell us what his desert island was like, and the England he finds himself in is like "savage" Ithaca to Tennyson's Ulysses.

Elizabeth Bishop's childhood was as displaced as Robert Lowell's was contained: a father who died before she could know him; a mother whose mental collapse meant that she did not see her after she was five. She was brought up by grandparents and then her aunt, all of whom feature in her poems--but how differently from Lowell's distinguished forebears. She wrote to him: "all you have to do is put down the names", con vinced that nobody would be interested in "my Uncle Artie, say". The characters in her poems may not have direct bearing on American history, but Aunt Consuelo, Cousin Arthur, Miss Gillespie complete her landscapes as tiny figures in a painting might. And we must remember that Elizabeth Bishop was a painter of some distinction.

Her early years were full of sickness. She would always suffer from asthma, and later endured severe bouts of depression, exacerbated by her self-confessed alcoholism.

The literary friendship that she valued most alongside that with Cal Lowell was one with Marianne Moore (see Becoming a Poet, David Kalstone's essential account of these relationships). She generally took to heart Moore's advice on poems, although she held out when Moore was shocked by the inclusion of a "water-closet" in her poem "Roosters"! Many of the wonderful letters she exchanged with Moore and Lowell are preserved in the "Selected letters", One Art.