‘A Very Important Violence of Tone’: Bishop’s ‘Roosters’ and Other Poems

Abstract

This chapter explores ways in which violence of tone served as an important and decisive feature of Bishop’s style, beginning at Vassar College and extending through the end of her career. In a college poem such as “A Word with You” (1933), as well as “Roosters” (1941), “The Fish” (1940), “The Armadillo” (1957), “Trouvée” (1968), “In the Waiting Room” (1971), and “Crusoe in England” (1971), Bishop carefully prepares for moments of violence that flash out from a seemingly settled verbal environment. Bishop’s technique profoundly influenced the work of her friend and poetic peer Robert Lowell. Despite Bishop’s reputation for calm restraint and fastidious perfection, her work is more powerful because of the violence of tone that flashes out of poems at their moments of greatest intensity.