Abstract
Elizabeth Bishop’s relationship to the literal places she lived in, travelled through and sometimes made home, has long been a key concern of critics and readers. What interests me in this article is Bishop’s relationship to a country she visited on just a few occasions, namely England. In so doing, I intend to focus not so much on Bishop’s experiences in England—she made short trips there in the 1930s, 1960s and 1970s—but rather on her idea of England as a poetic home and the extent to which contemporary poets in Britain and Ireland have been influenced by her writing. Bishop’s England is thus at least two things here, a body of literature she herself reads and reinterprets in her poetry, and, more recently, a national poetry that has itself become Bishopesque in light of her contemporary popularity.
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Notes
Leviston [32].
Cited by Kalstone [30].
Campbell [17].
McCorkle [36].
Said [47].
Bishop [12, 183–184].
Manning and Taylor [38].
Cited by Miller [39, 517].
Bishop, Poems, 129.
Ibid., 198.
See Ellis [23].
Tóibín [48].
Bishop, Poems, 185.
Ibid., 91.
Ibid., 25.
Biele [4, xlvii].
Li [35, 20].
Bishop, Poems, 89.
Ibid., 90.
Bishop [13, 95].
Bishop, Poems, 123.
Bishop, Prose, 95.
Bishop [14, 41].
Ibid., 42.
The majority of biographers and scholars write “Maud” (as did Bishop herself) but the correct spelling is Maude.
Bishop [9, 98–99].
Bishop [10, 307].
Fountain and Brazeau [27, 16].
Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe, 98.
Ibid., 99.
Ibid., 203.
Ibid., 203.
Ibid., 203.
Bishop [6].
Goldensohn [29, 5].
Anderson [1, 21].
Bishop, Poems, 7.
As Rees-Jones points out, “The image of the burning child recurs in Bishop’s work, not only in ‘In the Village’ … but also in the early poem ‘Casabianca’, which includes the line ‘And love’s the burning boy’, and the late unfinished draft ‘A Drunkard’, while likewise recalls the Salem fire, to which the mother and child are witness”. See Rees-Jones [45, 137].
Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe, 208.
Fenton [25, 13].
Bishop, Poems, 219.
Ibid., 196.
Bishop [8, 12].
Rosenbaum [46].
Bishop, Prose, 414.
Bishop, Poems, 58.
Ibid., 129.
Ibid., 43.
Ibid., 58.
Ibid., 22.
Ibid., 327.
Leviston [34, 437].
Ibid., 454.
Ibid., 438.
Bishop, Poems, 196.
Ibid., 197.
Ibid., 197.
McKendrick [37, 139].
Doty [21, 69].
Bishop, Poems, 197.
Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe, 246.
Victorian poetry is clearly not the only English poetic tradition Bishop was influenced by. Metaphysical poets like Donne and Herbert were just as important, likewise Romantic writers, in particular Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats. In the twentieth-century Anglo-American poets, Auden and Eliot, not to mention William Empson and even Dylan Thomas, also influenced her at different stages of her career. More research remains to be done on, for example, her interest in the early modern masque or her frequent allusions to Shakespeare. So too her interest in English hymns and nonsense poetry. See Bishop [7], Costello [19], Ravinthiran [43] and Cook [18].
Travisano [49].
Heaney [28, 101].
Boland [15, 85–96].
Paulin [41, 94].
Donaghy [20, 120].
Rees-Jones [44, 12].
O’Reilly [40, 20–21].
Flynn [26, 34].
Armitage [2, 18].
Burt [16].
Ibid, 321.
Ibid., 322.
Ibid., 323–324.
Ibid., 329.
Bishop, “The Grandmothers”, Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, 107–108.
Bishop, Poems, 91.
E-mail to author, 5 August 2010.
Leviston [33], “Bishop in Louisiana”, The Guardian (2 August 2010). Reprinted in Disinformation (London: Picador, 2015), 8–9.
E-mail to Leviston, 9 August 2010.
E-mail to author, 28 August 2010.
Bishop, Poems, 250.
Ibid., 44.
Ibid., 125.
Ibid., 176.
Ibid., 193.
Waite [50, 70].
Ibid., 70.
Ibid., 186.
Ibid., 62.
In Bishop’s poem the fish becomes inedible after the speaker’s long scrutiny of it. In Leviston’s poem the fish are literally inedible due to the oil slick.
Bishop, Poems, 62.
Ibid., 184.
Ibid., 64.
Leviston [31, 24].
Heaney [28, 105–106].
Bishop, Poems, 64.
In the letters to Dr Foster Bishop connects this image to a dream she had on a drunken bus ride in New Hampshire: “I had a dream in which everything was very wild and dark and stormy and you were in it feeding me from your breast. (I should think a common dream about a woman analyst) anyway you were much bigger than life size, or maybe I was just reduced to baby size, and it seemed to be very calm inside the raging storm”. Vassar Archive, Folder 118.33.
Bishop and Lowell [11, 18].
Bishop, Poems, 129.
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Ellis, J. Under the influence: Elizabeth Bishop’s England and Frances Leviston’s Louisiana. J Transatl Stud 18, 152–176 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s42738-020-00044-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s42738-020-00044-z