Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

Chapter I. THE TRAVELLER A simple, rather austere account of life and travels, friends, too, like Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell who have affected your writing. Since so many poems are concerned with travel and the coast, I’ll illustrate from them from time to time. Also, mention your two childhood stories. Other sources of poetry, dreams, pictures, and a feeling for natural, unsophisticated people ( Jeronimo’s House, Cootchie, even Helena Morley ) will work into the introductory chapter too, so that a reader who doesn’t know you at all will get a notion of what to expect, at least.

Chapter II. THE ARTIST I’m not altogether sure about the title of this one. I think you’re an “artist” more than you are a “writer”—that is, you are preoccupied with form. What you have to say is very much the way you say it, in the stories as well as the poems. In this you are like Webern who defined life, I think, as a search for form “To life, that is to defend a form.” Also like Wittgenstein who was unable to make a system of his philosophy because he was unable not to think clearly. In this chapter, I’ll mention your liking for Klee and Ernst — artists very different in temperament but who worked in the same atmosphere in Germany and must have had an effect on you. In temperament you are probably more like Klee than the flamboyant Ernst, but Man Moth and the Monument and some of your sleeping (or not sleeping) poems are very Ernstish. I think both Klee and Ernst used hallucinatory and dream material as much as they could, and I’ll mention this. However, I think it is important to understand that they, and you too, I believe, regard dream experience as part of the continuum of experience in general. That is, there is no split personality, but rather a sensitivity that extends equally into the subconscious and the conscious world. That was one of the discoveries of the surrealists and symbolists too. Or perhaps I’m wrong? What do you think?

Chapter III. AFFINITIES This chapter will follow through your suggestion that you are a “descendant” of the Transcendentalists. Thoreau, I think, more than Emerson and some of the others. For the more intellectual transcendentalists, Nature was what Emerson called “a dream and a shade[,]” a veil in which God was immanent. They presumed that a moral order was present in the Universe, and that man interpreted that order through his observations of Nature, and, like Wordsworth, regained knowledge of immortality and eternity. It’s hard for anyone now to regard things in so simple a manner. However, once the metaphysics fades, what remains is an amazing sense of nature itself, animals as animals, plants as plants;—Thoreau’s views all along. There is a poem about the sea which I will quote, in which Thoreau says he would rather “stroll upon the beach” picking up pebbles and talking to shipwrecked sailors than plunge into the depth of the sea where there are fewer pearls. I’ll quote this in connection with The Imaginary Iceberg. I think too, that it is no longer possible to anticipate great ends for mankind. Cirque d’Hiver, “Well, we have come this far.” And the “half is enough” of The Gentlemen of Shallot, are hardly transcendentalist views.

I think Emily Dickinson moves away from transcendentalism in the direction of Thoreau. For her, there is a theological framework of course. Yet she opts for the real world when it appears to be at odds with Heaven. In that wonderful poem “I cannot [live] with you/ it would be life…” she labels paradise “sordid”. And the poem, “Because I could not stop for death…” proceeds, in thought and image, your CHEMIN DE FER. I wonder if I am right in detecting a note of loss in many of your poems. Loss of the religion Emily Dickinson had. I take the whole of CHEMIN DE FER as a parable, a conceit, really, in which the pool and the old hermit can be understood as symbols of the church, and of Christ, possibly. I’m not sure it should be overlaiden with “meaning”, but that is what I make of it. Then, your lyrics use half rhyme as E.D. did. And you personify, occasionally, as she does. “A warning to the startled grass/ That darkness is about to pass.” Again, in your sestina Miracle for Breakfast I take it there is a reference to the Eucharist … often alluded to by Emily Dickinson. Your view is far more complex than hers, and I think that particular poem plays with vision as Ernst does, but is less bitter in its implications. There’s a wonderful quotation from Hoffmansthal that I’ll quote in connection with the sestina … describing the collapse of the visible world: “My mind compelled me to view all things with uncanny closeness; and just as I once saw a piece of skin from my little finger under a magnifying lens, and it looked like a landscape with mighty furors and caves, so it was now with people and what they said and did.” This in connection with the breadcrumb that turns into a mansion. I love that poem.

I hesitate to mention, as a last Affinity, the Imagists because so many critics seem to have lined you up with them. There is, however, something to be said here. When a poet “paints pictures” or images he also, like the painter, interprets. That is, he chooses how to present something, and he presents it in a way that says something. What he says, of course, is open to interpretation of a secondary sort. I think you are right to think that the reader should make of your poems what he wants to. Nevertheless, the poet limits the canvas. William Carlos Williams limited his canvases. I know what his moral views of life are, even though he is true to his dictum, “no ideas but in things.” The same with you. When the pelicans crash “unnecessarily” hard, it is you who see them, it is you who intrude the qualification. I don’t think this is wrong — on the contrary, it is necessary and it makes the poem resonant. But I think one should mention that imagism is not so far from the stream of English Literature as some people suppose.

Chapter IV. PRECISION AND RESONANCE. I think I mentioned this pet theory of mine to you before. The success of imagist poetry depends, I think, on the tension maintained between the accurate descriptions and their possible meanings. This goes with what I mentioned above concerning interpretation. Mere accuracy is boring and flat, like a text book. (I’ll find more examples to illustrate) On the other hand, it is often more annoying to read poetry which seeks resonance without precision. In the light, Ezra Pound’s whole career may be regarded as a search for resonance, sometimes achieved, as in the translations from the Chinese, sometimes failing miserably, as in the more obscure Cantos because the allusions are not precise enough. Since I am anxious to get this to the mail, I’ll leave the illustrations from your poems and stories — IN THE VILLAGE is full of resonance — for a later letter.

Chapter V. SOURCES OF RESONANCE. There are common sources of resonance — i.e. metaphor, literary allusion, allusion to common social phenomena and background. These are frequently found in your poems and I’ll give examples. But I think there are two or possibly three sources of resonance that you have, in a sense, developed. The first I call the ambiguity of appearances. The crumb can be a mansion. The map can be more real than the land; tapestry of landscape suddenly lifts and floats away before the Christians. […] with this visual ambiguity, is the possibility of inversion — correction, almost, through inversion.

In LOVE LIES SLEEPING, for instance, the man who “sees” is the man who sees the inverted city as correct. (Is this also a play on the theory of optics?) And in Insomnia, the image of the moon in the mirror is truer, or appears more true than the moon titself. I could find many more examples — from the new poems, too.