Abstract
Bishop’s shifts in tone are sometimes subtle and at other times erratic. I am interested in two coincidental effects: shifts in poetic form (meter, rhythm, speech), together with signals of cultural identification. Voiced syntax and cultural signals reach readers with musical shifts (such as alterations from blank verse to prosaic voices) that lead up to such voiced interjections. These gongs in Bishop’s work, odd and humorous utterances, while jarring, also bring the reader into the poem through recognition of cultural echoes. Exclamations disrupt traditional reading experiences of the sublime and authentic; moments of cultural debasement initially appear to mar or de-authenticate poetry. In this process Bishop portrays late twentieth-century culture’s turn away from traditional artforms. This innovative otherness registers different cultural markers of global identities.
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Notes
- 1.
In his “Hamlet” essay, T. S. Eliot writes: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion …. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear” (Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, 48).
- 2.
Vidyan Ravinthiran writes a detailed analysis of the shifting identities, and Bishop’s nuanced exploration of her response to class disjunctions in “‘Manuelzinho ,’ Brazil and Identity Politics” in Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Jonathan Ellis. Ravinthiran begins the essay by investigating the poem’s oversimplified epigraph, “(Brazil. A friend of the writer is speaking.)” Vidyan also hears a lot of Bishop’s voice: “That’s to say, the sympathetic interval between Bishop and Lota is as relevant to ‘Manuelzinho’ as that which exists between the speaker and the man who lives on what she considers her land” (34–35). He thoroughly develops Bishop’s unique presentation of what we now call identity politics while also attending to Brazil’s contemporaneous political climate (33–47).
- 3.
In “The Case of the Falling S: Elizabeth Bishop, Visual Poetry and the International Avant-Garde,” Susan Rosenbaum demonstrates how Bishop’s falling letters draw attention to rhyme and formal artifice: “we can read the truncation of the n as required by the rhyme: ‘fantasía,’ ‘to be a-,’ ‘ever see a.’ In the visibly awkward breakage of ‘a-/n,’ Bishop provides a visual, iconic analogy for ‘eyesore.’” This is a “treatment of the desperation at once concealed and expressed by the costumes and dances of Carnival. The ‘a-/n’ provides a crucial crack in the poem’s visual ‘costume,’ through which we glimpse the violent treatment that may await the naked dog and the necessity for the dog’s disguise, simultaneously” (Reading Elizabeth Bishop: An Edinburgh Companion 185).
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Cleghorn, A. (2019). “Spontaneity occurs in a good attack”: Voice Control in Late Bishop. In: Cleghorn, A. (eds) Elizabeth Bishop and the Music of Literature. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33180-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33180-1_8
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