As the centenary of her birth arrives (she was born on 8 February 1911), I can't help thinking about Elizabeth Bishop and her quiet transformation into the major American poet of the postwar era. While readers still return, now and then, to Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke, Plath and Sexton, somehow poets themselves seem always to prefer Bishop. I do.
In her own lifetime, she was not so widely admired as today. She never had the "public intellectual" side of Lowell or, say, Allen Ginsberg. She didn't have Roethke's robust rhythms, Plath's or Sexton's sad but highly public breakdowns. Instead of breaking down, she put the world together in a clear and coherent fashion, in a small quantity of perfect poems, such as "One Art", a villanelle that perpetually astonishes with its craft and soul: the subject of loss has rarely been so movingly explored, with an off-handedness that belies the ferocious art that makes it possible. "It's evident / the art of losing's not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster." That ending is thoroughly, painfully earned through the accumulation of losses, from little ("the fluster / of lost door keys") to huge – the losing of "you" in that final moment – "you" being a lover, one assumes.
Bishop wrote without pretension, taking the old forms (sonnet, villanelle, sestina) and showing how to make contemporary poems out of them, within them. In the longer "story" poems of hers, "The Fish" or "The Moose", for example, she uses rhyme as echo, finding a subtle meter that is never obtrusive. These are two of the finest poems of the past half century, so quietly resonant – an oxymoronic phrase, perhaps, but the only one I can think of to pinpoint their apparently casual but deeply–wrought nature. It's that combination that makes her so good.
Although she lived for many years in Brazil and elsewhere, she came from Nova Scotia, and for her the sea itself was an evolving symbol, often memorably evoked, as in the ending of "At the Fishhouses" (which you can hear her read here):
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world,
derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
She approximates old-fashioned blank verse here, and this gives the writing its aura of connection to past literature, but this is very contemporary in its insistence on the difficulty of knowing. We know what we know only through similitude itself: "It is like what we imagine knowledge to be," not what it is. We can't know what it is. Indeed, it's always contingent, "historical, flowing, and flown". We have it, but we don't.
I go back to Bishop often, and her poems never grow stale. They address our fragility as human beings, our wonder at the world of animals and fish, birds, beasts of any kind. She gives us maps, but withdraws them as well – or writes over them. Reality is like the moose in "The Moose", enchanting a busload of travellers, giving them "a sweet / sensation of joy". I feel that joy whenever I pick up her Complete Poems: 1927-1979. It's one of the handful of books I could not live happily without.
