Elizabeth Bishop's social conscience.

Publication: ELH

Publication Date: 22-JUN-95

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COPYRIGHT 1995 Johns Hopkins University Press

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)

Here, as in "Contradictions," Rich wants less art and more anger, and I sense that she is talking about her earlier self while addressing Bishop. In the 1950s the precocious Rich was also selected and certified by the literary establishment, and Bishop seemed to Rich the poet she could too easily become - the poet who was considered, in Robert Lowell's phrase, the author of "the best poems . . . written by a woman in this century."(3)

Bishop herself despised that kind of praise, and she suffered under the reputation of "Miss" Bishop. "Most of my writing life I've been lucky about reviews," she admitted to George Starbuck. "But at the very end they often say 'The best poetry by a woman in this decade, or year, or month.' Well, what's that worth?" Bishop's feminism rarely seemed this pronounced or undivided. In the same interview she dismissed the "tract poetry" of feminist writers like Robin Morgan, and she insisted that she "never made any distinction between" male and female poets. But she also made this provocative remark: "I was in college in the days - it was the Depression, the end of the Depression - when a great many people were communist, or would-be communist. . . . I never gave feminism much thought, until . . . ."(4)

Unfortunately, George Starbuck interrupted at this point. But the historical context that Bishop emphasizes for her early career - the 1930s - is pertinent to an understanding of her relationship to feminism. Living in Brazil in 1966, Bishop claimed that she was "much more interested in social problems and politics now" than she had been in the thirties.(5) She even went so far as to attempt a poem about the suicide of Getulio Vargas, the elected president and former dictator of Brazil.(6) But Bishop never completed "Suicide of a Moderate Dictator," her most overtly political poem; its progress was hampered by her long-standing distaste for tract poetry. Responding in 1938 to Marianne Moore's sense of the "tentativeness" of her poems, Bishop wondered if the problem were her unwillingness to delineate a coherent political position - though she hastened to add, "I'm a 'Radical,' of course."(7) The problem for Bishop, early and late, was not her values as such but her discomfort - nurtured in the thirties - with the conventions of political poetry.

Bishop's values, especially her feminism, entered her poems in other ways. Characterizing her more recent reproachment with Bishop, Rich remarks that "poems examining intimate relationships" are replaced in Bishop's work by "poems examining relationships between people who are, for reasons of inequality, distanced: rich and poor, landowner and tenant, white woman and Black woman, invader and native."(8) I would alter this insight to say that poems emphasizing social inequality do not take the place of poems emphasizing sexuality; rather, for Bishop, the consideration of gender and sexuality grew to be inseparable from the consideration of nationality or race. Missing in Bishop's poetry is almost the complete domain of what she thought of as political poetry; but from the beginning of her career, Bishop was "more interested in social problems" than, in retrospect, she would allow.

Until 1934, Bishop was an undergraduate at Vassar College; she lived in New York City for the next few years, traveling widely, and then settled in Key West, Florida just before the Second World War broke out in 1939. Her lifestyle, supported by a small trust fund and by occasional employment, was neither lavish nor uncomfortable, but many years later she would recall her experience of the "Marxist thirties."

I was very aware of the Depression - some of my family were much affected by it. After all, anybody who went to New York and rode the Elevated could see that things were wrong. But I had lived with poor people and knew something of poverty at firsthand. About this time I took a walking-trip in Newfoundland and I saw much worse poverty there. I was all for being a socialist till I heard Norman Thomas [the Socialist Party presidential candidate in 1932] speak; but he was so dull. Then I tried anarchism, briefly.(9)

Bishop was, to be sure, someone who "rode the Elevated" and looked down on the social conditions of the Depression. And she was also someone who distrusted the easy proclamation of ideological associations and shifts - even in herself ("Then I tried anarchism, briefly"). But Bishop was aware of the conditions of the rural poor in Newfoundland and Key West as well as in her native Nova Scotia. Even at Vassar College she experienced the intellectual and political alternatives of the 1930s. Mary McCarthy, with whom Bishop established the alternative magazine Con Spirito in 1933, recalled the political climate of Vassar when she and Bishop were students there:

Most of our radicals were Socialists [rather than Communists], and throughout that election year they campaigned for Norman Thomas, holding parades and rallies. . . . Then our trustee, Franklin Roosevelt, was elected President. . . . With the impetus of the New Deal and memories of the breadlines behind us, even we aesthetes began reading about Sacco and Vanzetti and Mooney. We wrote papers for Contemporary Prose Fiction on Dos Passos.(10)

Like McCarthy, Bishop was more or less an "aesthete," but she was also reading about Sacco and Vanzetti. "Politically I considered myself a socialist," she remembered, "but I disliked 'social conscious' writing. I stood up for T. S. Eliot when everybody else was talking about James T. Farrell. The atmosphere at Vassar was left-wing; it was the popular thing."(11)

Bishop may have stood apart, but she did not stand alone. Her sensibility finds its mirror during the thirties in the Partisan Review, whose...

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