Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

This may have little to do with the arts or with my own poetry — except that I may express some of these notions in my verse; I can’t very well tell myself. What I mean is of course more than “observation” or knowing how to care for the baby, row a boat, or enter a drawing-room! (Some of the Marxian critics have expressed it, I think.) It is a living in reality that works both ways, the non-intellectual sources of wisdom and sympathy. (And of course both Hemingway and Lawrence were capable of horrible cruelties — why did I pick them?) A better example, and something I have read & read since I have been in Brazil, is Chekov. If only more artists could be that good as well as good artists. He makes most of them look like pigs — and yet he sacrificed nothing to his art, either. I feel I could die happy if I could write one story — or poem — about Brazil one third as good as “Peasants.”

To take up your chapters. I. Most of my poems I can still abide were written before I met Robert Lowell or had read his first book. However, since then he has influenced me a great deal, in many ways. He is one of the very few people I can talk to about writing freely & naturally, and he is wonderfully quick, intuitive, modest, and generous about it. With the exception of Marianne, however, almost all my friends up until Cal (Lowell), and since, have not been writers.

II Yes, I agree with you. I think that’s what I was trying to say in the speech above. There is no “split.” Dreams, works of art (some), glimpses of the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important. I can’t believe we are wholly irrational and I do admire Darwin! But reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic — and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. (In this sense it is always “escape,” don’t you think?)

III I don’t believe I’ve read Thoreau’s poetry until quite recently, actually, just prose. I agree with what you say, however. At the same time I’ve always thought one of the most extraordinary insights into the “sea” is Rimbaud’s L’eternite :

“C’est la mer allée

Avec le soleil.”

This approximates what I think is called the “Anesthetic revelation,” (William James?). Two of my favorite poets (not best poets) are Herbert (I’ve read him steadily almost all my life), and Baudelaire. I can’t attempt to reconcile them — but you are obviously a very clever girl and perhaps you can!

You are probably right about a “sense of loss,” and it is probably obvious where it comes from — it is not religious. I have never been religious in any formal way and I am not a believer. I dislike the didacticism, not to say condescension, of the practicing Christians I know (but maybe I’ve had bad luck). They usually seem more or less on the way to being fascists. But I am interested in religions. I enjoy reading, say, St. Theresa, very much, and Kierkegaard (whom I read in vast quantities long ago, before he was fashionable), Simone Weil, etc. — but as far as people go, — I prefer Chekov. I’m appalled by the Catholicism, or lack of it, in this Catholic country, while remaining very interested in the architecture it produced. (In the U S A, for example, it is barbarous & shameless that only now, last year, have the clergy taken the stand on race-relations that they should have taken several centuries ago.) Nevertheless, there have been some good Christians! Just the way here in the midst of massive inertia and almost total corruption you occasionally find a real expert at something-or-other, working away unknown, honest and devoted. (The greatest authority on butterflies here was a postman for years — and you can’t get much lower, here — and was recognized & given medals, etc. in Europe before Brazil ever heard of him. But please don’t get the idea I romanticize such people. They just do come along often enough, in Church or State, or the arts, to give one hope.)

You mention Williams. I may have been influenced by him. I’ve read him always, of course, and usually like his flatter impressionistic poems best, not when he’s trying to be profound. (Of his late poems I do like Asphodel. ) But that diffuseness is exhausting (like Pound’s). Williams had that rather silly language theory — but it has just occurred to me (I’ve been listening to some contemporary music on the hi-fi) that perhaps he really made some sort of advance like that made by composers around 1900 or so, and that a new set of rules & regulations might appear, to go on from there, that could make his kind of poetry more interesting and satisfying — like “serialization” in music. This isn’t exact at all — but I feel that both he & Pound, and their followers, would be vastly improved if one could lean on a sense of “system” in their work somewhere … (After an hour of W. I really want to go off and read Houseman, or a hymn by Cowper. — I’m full of hymns, by the way — after church — going in Nova Scotia, boarding-school, and singing in the college choir — and I often catch echoes from them in my own poems.)

Wallace Stevens was more of an influence, I think. At college I knew “Harmonium” almost by heart. (“Wading at Wellfleet” I believe is the only poem that shows this influence much.) But I got tired of him and now find him romantic and thin — but very cheering, because, in spite of his critical theories (very romantic), he did have such a wonderful time with all those odd words, and found a superior way of amusing himself. Cummings was often doing the same thing, don’t you think?

Now I’ve lost track of your chapter. Well — I do usually prefer poetry with form to it. I was very much wrapped up in 16th & 17th century lyrics for years (still am, in a way). I spent days in the New York Public Library copying out the songs from masques, etc. (Now you can get them in books, but a great many you couldn’t then — in the 30’s.) I also wrote about a dozen strict imitations of Campian, Nashe, etc. while at college (one or two were in that “Trial Balances” book, I think). I do have a weakness for hymns, as I said — and Cowper’s “Castaway,” etc.

But I don’t need to give you a list of my eclectic reading—

You must be right about the Eucharist in “A Miracle for Breakfast.” I had never noticed it myself until a Brazilian, Catholic, of course, translated that poem into Portuguese a few months ago and said the same thing to me.

IV I think that is a good point and, from what you say, I agree—

V This seems to make very good sense, too. It is odd what you say about “optics” in “Love Lies Sleeping,” because I was reading, or had just read, Newton’s “Optics” about then. (Although again I wasn’t aware of this until you pointed it out to me!) (I think the man at the end of the poem is dead.) At the risk of sounding Cocteau-like — I believe I told you that I did work in the Optical Shop in the Key West Submarine Base for a very short stretch during the war? Cleaning & adjusting binoculars, mostly. I’m sure I told you this — I liked it, but had to leave because I was allergic to the acids used for clean the prisms.

VI That will be hard — my “contribution”! Because of my era, sex, situation, education, etc. I have written, so far, what I feel is a rather “precious” kind of poetry, although I am very much opposed to the precious. One wishes things were different, that one could begin all over again. One almost envies those Russian poets a bit — who feel they are so important, and perhaps are. At least the party seems afraid of them, whereas I doubt that any American poet (except poor wretched Pound) ever bothered our government much. But then I remember that in the late 16th century poetry that was even published was looked down on; the really good poetry was just handed around. So one probably shouldn’t worry too much about one’s position, and certainly never about being “contemporary.”