Elizabeth Bishop: from coterie to canon.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.--"Sestina"

"Oh, please," Elizabeth Bishop once told me, "Let's not talk about poetry." And that afternoon we didn't. But now, thirty years later, my friend and teacher is no longer here to stop me with one of her firm looks. So, with apologies to Miss Bishop's shade, I shall proceed, though I know she would have been both impatient and embarrassed to read an essay in her honor. And it is my intention to honor her--not with a general panegyric but what I hope is a dispassionate and detailed look at the reasons behind her current popularity.

My subject is how Elizabeth Bishop came--slowly and surprisingly--to be considered the most highly esteemed American poet of the mid-twentieth century. Had I been discussing the leading mid-century poet thirty years ago, my subject would necessarily have been Robert Lowell, who at that moment enjoyed an indisputable preeminence among his contemporaries. I remember James Dickey, no master of understatement, introducing Lowell at a reading in the early 1970s with the closing line, "Here is our Milton." Whether or not one agreed with that statement--and I must admit that I did not--one had to accept that it was then, to use a phrase from the reader-response critics, consensually plausible.

If I chose to indulge in Dickeyesque bravado, I might now introduce Bishop by saying, "Here is our Dickinson." Today that comparison would also be consensually plausible. No American poet of the mid-century generation, not even Lowell, now stands higher in critical esteem or general popularity. Bishop is currently the most widely taught American woman poet of the twentieth century. Indeed, after Emily Dickinson, she is probably the most widely taught woman poet in the English language.

Is Elizabeth Bishop overrated? Perhaps a bit. I have to confess, however, that for several reasons this question doesn't particularly interest me. First, she is a writer of such excellence and depth that her work not only deserves but also rewards the attention it currently receives. Second, literary preeminence is a precarious state. Thirty years from now another poet will almost certainly have captivated the love of readers and the attention of scholars to be regarded as the generation's leading figure. Who knows who it will be--Theodore Roethke, Gwendolyn Brooks, Weldon Kees, or, once again, Robert Lowell? Indeed, Bishop's reputation is sure to fluctuate over the coming years, but her current vogue does mean that she will remain canonic for the foreseeable future--one of the few poets who is universally anthologized by editors, assigned to students, discussed by critics, and--most important--cherished by readers. For a poet of Bishop's distinction, such a happy afterlife seems quite just. Finally, what does the term "overrated" really mean for most writers but a deeply deserved moment of triumph? In Bishop's case, I would invoke the words of the poet Howard Nemerov, who upon receiving--in the span of eight days-both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, exclaimed with satisfaction, "Overrated--at last!"

Instead what interests me is Bishop's steady posthumous rise in fame relative to her contemporaries. She was not an isolated figure of excellence in an unexceptional literary era. She was a member of an immensely talented generation of American writers born in the decade between 1908 and 1918. The first generation of American poets to grow up after the Modernist revolution in the arts, they constitute no merely chronological assembly but a group that displays a strong and cohesive personality shaped--some might even say scarred--by its tumultuous place in American history. Born around the time of the First World War and great influenza pandemic, these poets spent their later childhood during the prosperous Twenties, but then came to maturity during the Great Depression and World War II. Alcoholism, family disruption, mental instability, even madness and suicide were not uncommon among these writers who played a decisive role creating the diverse landscape of contemporary American poetry.

The mid-century generation includes at least a dozen figures besides Bishop for whom one might claim major status--Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Robert Hayden, Weldon Kees, Randall Jarrell, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Berryman, William Stafford, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Kenneth Rexroth, and Thomas McGrath. To this list others might add Karl Shapiro, Delmore Schwartz, Muriel Rukeyser, John Ciardi, Josephine Miles, William Jay Smith, May Swenson, ...