Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

I have always wanted — like many other poets, I think — to write some really “popular” songs, not “art” songs. One thing I like very much in Brazil is the popular music — the yearly sambas are, or were (too much U S influence now, I’m afraid), often superb spontaneous folk-music, and I want very much to write a piece about them — the collecting is very difficult here, however. There is also a living tradition, in the interior, of the ballads — news events, old tales, etc. — not such good poetry as the sambas but rather wonderful all the same — Besides the DIARY I translated, and work on the book about contemporary architecture, I have done, recently, some translations of Brazilian poetry. (I’ll let you know when they’re published — some are to be in POETRY, I think.) But I really don’t care much for doing it, or believe in it, and my translations are rather literal — unlike Lowell’s — so I only do poems that seem to go into English without much loss — very limiting, naturally.

Another friend who influenced me — not with his books but with his character — was John Dewey, whom I knew well and was very fond of. He and Marianne are the most truly naturally “democratic” people I’ve known, I think. — He had almost the best manners I have ever encountered, always had time, took an interest in everything, — no detail, no weed or stone or cat or old woman was unimportant to him.

Now if you have any more questions please let me know. In about 3 weeks I am going on a trip, “to the interior”, really, this time, and will be out of touch with mail for two or three weeks, probably. Perhaps I should add one thought — perhaps it is just because I went to Europe earlier than most of my “contemporary” poets — and I am a few years older than some of them — but it is odd how I often feel myself to be a late-late Post World War I generation-member, rather than a member of the Post World War II generation. Perhaps the Key West years also had something to do with it. — (Until her death Pauline Hemingway was one of my best friends there, etc.) But I also feel that Cal (Lowell) and I in our very different ways are both descendents from the Transcendentalists — but you may not agree.

Again please excuse my bad typing — I’m not very good at best, but this keyboard with all its Çç and a §§ out of place doesn’t help—

I hope your little girl’s rash is all cured by now—

Sincerely yours,

Elizabeth Bishop

44 Porter Street

Watertown, Mass.

March 28, 1963

Dear Miss Bishop,

I am delighted with both your letters — really, I can’t tell you how delighted. I was in real trepidation after I sent off my letter to you in, was it February? Thought I had asked silly questions, or questions which you couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. I am amused that you call me a “critic” (one up from a reviewer?) for I am a raw amateur, preferring teaching or mothering or writing poems myself to this awful task of trying to say badly what someone else has said well. However I was pleased, when we arrived back from an early spring visit to Vermont last week, to find the streets full of children, clothes hanging out on the lines (Watertown being Watertown “awful but cheerful”) spring arrived and your letter in our mailbox. I’ll try to answer it point by point, as you did mine, and then go on to your second letter which arrived today.

I will write Miss Bowman today and ask her to send you (and me) some of the books which have been written already. I know a kind and well-meaning professor in Ann Arbor (I don’t mean those adjectives to sound derogatory) who has written a book on Wilbur and is working on one on Lowell. The Wilbur book is finished, I think. Otherwise, I don’t know who Miss Bowman has found to embellish her list of famous authors writing famouser ones. Don Hall says she is a “nut”. I suppose that means she is somewhat scatterbrained and doesn’t herself know what she wants. I have not heard from her since I left Ann Arbor (I did a MA degree there last year) so this is another reason for me to write to her.

Although I have no plans to publish something in a magazine, I do want to talk over my impression of your poems with Robert Lowell. He is lecturing at Harvard this semester; I went with some friends of mine to a poetry workshop he conducts at the Loeb theatre a week ago and arranged to show him what I had written. Then I came home and decided that everything had to be re -written, and I haven’t yet had the courage to go see him. I am such a ponderous worker, you will have to forgive me. But I would rather wait years than produce something half-baked. I plan to finish a twelve to fifteen page plan of action, so to speak, which I will send to you and to him.

Yes, I should very much like to have your new book, and I am exceedingly grateful to you for having written to your agent. I shall write to him too so that he will know that I am real. I am of course most anxious to read it, and the Diary of Helena Morley. I’ll look up Pritchett’s review and also your two published stories when I next get to Widner. (I must confess that library stacks rather terrify me — I put off going to them in the same way I put off going to the supermarket) I am grateful, too, for the information you give me about your childhood and background. Can you perhaps tell me a little about your parents. Did you know them at all? What sort of people where they? was your father a businessman of some sort? Don’t answer if you don’t want to, naturally. I like your seafaring ancestors.

I am glad to know that you are fond (passionately) of painting. And of music and architecture. I’d suspected this, and its good to have your confirmation. One of the points I am making about your poetry is that is is visual but not what I call Impersonal. That is, your sense of personality of places and people, is suggested in visual terms. There is an interaction between the animate and inanimate world which suggest that you distinguish between them in order to show how they are alike. Everything you describe seems, too, as Philip Booth put it in one review, “to build toward a metaphorical whole.” But your metaphors, while exact as paintings on one hand, are open, really, on the other. That is what I like best about poems like The Imaginary Iceberg, The Bight, The Fish, even Cirque d’Hiver. It seems to me that, while your subjects are not what you call “all out” ones, they echo with a sort of alloutness which makes them, unu[su]ally, big poems and not trivial ones. If a poet is supposed to comment upon his age (is that Spender?) you do, surely, if obliquely, even in so light a poem as The Gentlemen of Shalott (I taught that to my senior high school class this fall and they loved it — we were “studying” Tennyson). As certainly it is not imposing high sounding interpretations on your Cirque d’Hiver, Over 20000 etc (a reference to concordance of the Bible?) and Man-Moth to suggest [that] they have something “strongly worded” to say about contemporary life.

Well, this is very difficult. I think I had better send you a more organized essay next week sometime. I hope to catch you before you depart for the interior. One thing more about the poems, though. I agree that you and Marianne Moore should not be “dragged in” with each other; you write very differently, I think. If I mention Marianne Moore it will be as a friend of yours, not as an “influence.” That odious word!

Your second letter is as full of wonderful and necessary information as your first. I know that where you wrote poems is not all that relevant to how they arrived, yet what you say is interesting; I wonder if people don’t like to be told that sort of thing. Thanks also for the dream background of Varick Street, Rain Towards Morning, the last stanza of Anaphora (this last puzzles me). Of what significance [is] the title — it means a repetitive phrase at the beginning or end of successive verse in my dictionary, but does your poem repeat any phrases? Oh yes, and I wanted to ask you about your use of “syllabics.” The Roosters looks as if it were written by counting syllables, but I don’t think it is. The rhythm seems to me more subtle … as you suggest, heard, not counted.