Abstract
This chapter centres on the New England beach house in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘The End of March’. It argues that her contradictory descriptions of this house are intimately connected with the poet’s mental processes. Drawing both on classical and medieval memory arts, and on the consonances between Bishop’s work and the shadow-boxes constructed by the artist Joseph Cornell, it posits that Bishop’s dream-house does not just enable the creative process, but is coterminous with it.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Sestina’, in Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983). All quotations from Bishop’s poems will be taken from this edition, with page numbers given in the text in parentheses.
- 2.
See for example, ‘A Miracle for Breakfast’ and ‘Jerónimo’s House’, in Complete Poems, pp. 18, 34.
- 3.
Bachelard’s Poetics of Space was first published as La poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1958). The English translation cited in this chapter is The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas, 2nd edn (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). Joelle Bielle acknowledges the relevance of Bachelard to Bishop’s work in passing in ‘Swinging Through the Years: Elizabeth Bishop and “The End of March”’, The American Poetry Review, 38.6 (2009), 55–62 (p. 55).
- 4.
Cf. Heather Cass White, ‘Teasing the Lion’, Harvard Review, 16 (1999), 61–70 (pp. 66–67).
- 5.
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ghost, n., sense 1.
- 6.
OED, s.v. ghost, n., sense 2.
- 7.
OED, s.v. inspiration, n.
- 8.
The images of paw prints and kite were significant ones for Bishop; Bielle has identified five earlier unpublished poems in which Bishop attempted to use them (‘Revise, Revise: Elizabeth Bishop Writing “The End of March”’, in ‘In Worcester, Massachusetts’: Essays on Elizabeth Bishop, ed. by Laura Menides and Angela G. Dorenkamp (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 129–38.
- 9.
John Stillgoe, ‘Foreword to the 1994 Edition’, Poetics of Space, p. viii. Discussions of Bishop’s work that stress the role of the house as sanctuary include Cass, ‘Teasing the Lion’; Marit J. MacArthur, The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop and Ashbery: The House Abandoned (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); conversely, Susan McCabe argues that: ‘Bishop rejects the house as a symbol of permanence and wholeness’ (Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1994), p. 195).
- 10.
Cf. Jonathan Ellis, Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 67–71; Linda Anderson, ‘The Story of the Eye: Elizabeth Bishop and the Limits of the Visual’, in Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, ed. by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott (Newcastle: University of Newcastle and Bloodaxe Books, 2002), p. 163.
- 11.
Cf. White, ‘Teasing the Lion’, 68–70.
- 12.
Cf. Bonnie Costello, Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 79.
- 13.
Bachelard, Poetics of Space, pp. xx, 5.
- 14.
Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 6.
- 15.
Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 49.
- 16.
The resemblance between ‘The End of March’ and ‘The Sea & Its Shore’ has also been noted by Anne Colwell, Inscrutable Houses: Metaphors of the Body in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), p. 188.
- 17.
Elizabeth Bishop, The Collected Prose (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984), pp. 171–72. All quotations will be taken from this edition.
- 18.
Cf. Ellis, Art and Memory, p. 4.
- 19.
For an introduction to faculty psychology, see E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1975). For discussion focused specifically on the memory, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. pp. 60–68.
- 20.
See Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 18–55.
- 21.
Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. by Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), III.xvi.29–III.xviii.30.
- 22.
See further Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 89–98, and ‘The Poet as Master-Builder: Composition and Locational Memory in the Middle Ages’, New Literary History, 24 (1993), 881–904.
- 23.
See for example Colwell, Inscrutable Houses; Ellis, Art and Memory; Herbert Marks, ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Art of Memory’, Literary Imagination, 7 (2005), 197–224; and Brett C. Millier, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
- 24.
Letter of 11 September 1940, quoted in Marilyn May Lombardi, The Body and the Song: Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), p. 171. The italics are mine. For nineteenth-century references to the mind as attic or warehouse, which similarly indicate the persistence of the metaphor, see Ushashi Dasgupta’s chapter in this volume, especially note 6.
- 25.
For the structure of Geography III, see Eleanor Cook, Elizabeth Bishop at Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 208–48; for ‘The End of March’ and ‘Objects & Apparitions’, see pp. 241–46.
- 26.
After a long period of relative neglect, there has recently been renewed interest in Cornell. Good selections of his work may be found in Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay … Eterniday (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003); Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2015); and Deborah Solomon, Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997) provides biographically contextualised discussion.
- 27.
William Benton identifies Bishop’s art-works ‘Feather Box’ and ‘Anjinhos’ as showing Cornell’s influence (Exchanging Hats: Elizabeth Bishop: Paintings [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996], pp. 48–49, 50–51); in view of his fondness for the slot machine motif, and Bishop’s reference to his ‘slotmachine of visions’ in ‘Objects & Apparitions’, ‘E. Bishop’s Patented Slot-Machine’ (Exchanging Hats, pp. 76–77) should probably also be included in that category. Consonances between Bishop and Cornell have also been noted by Costello, Planets, p. 106; Ernesto Suárez-Toste, ‘“Telling It Slant”: The “Healthier” Surrealism of Elizabeth Bishop and Joseph Cornell’, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 42 (2001), 279–88.
- 28.
Bishop, Collected Prose, pp. 182, 185, 187.
- 29.
Shadowplay, p. 136.
- 30.
Shadowplay, p. 152; Wanderlust, pp. 204–5.
- 31.
Shadowplay, pp. 144–45.
- 32.
Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 42–44; Shadowplay, p. 144.
- 33.
See for example L’Humeur Vagabonde (Shadowplay, pp. 146–47).
- 34.
See Wanderlust, pp. 21, 178–79, 186–87.
- 35.
Bachelard, Poetics of Space, pp. 34–36.
- 36.
Bachelard, Poetics of Space, pp. 37, 36.
- 37.
Cf. Costello, Planets, p. 83.
- 38.
Bishop, Exchanging Hats, pp. 42–43; for discussion of the painting as an unofficial poetics, see Lavinia Greenlaw, ‘Interior with Extension Cord’, in Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry, ed. by W. N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2000), pp. 274–76. Cf. also Anderson’s analysis of Bishop’s depiction of wires and cables (‘Story of the Eye’, pp. 171–72). For a wider discussion of Bishop’s poetry in relation to her paintings, see Costello, Planets, pp. 79–106; she also considers Cornell’s work (pp. 107–41).
- 39.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 93.
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Griffiths, J. (2020). Elizabeth Bishop’s House in the Mind: Memory, Imagination, and Interior Space in ‘The End of March’. In: Griffiths, J., Hanna, A. (eds) Architectural Space and the Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36067-2_13
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