Elizabeth Bishop S Poetics Of Intimacy

Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy, a biographical and critical study of one of the great poets of this century, offers a fresh look at Bishop's published and unpublished writing over the course of her career. Informed by pragmatic, post-modern, and feminist theories, Victoria Harrison's study also makes extensive use of Bishop's archives, many pieces of which have never been discussed, to reveal the process of the poet's writing. Harrison explores Bishop's childhood memoirs, journals, letters, Brazilian travel prose, unfinished poems, and draft material, researching dates of undated material and reproducing Bishop's revisions, cancellations, and idiosyncratic spellings. Attentiveness to the detail of this archival writing gives Harrison a broad foundation for arguing that Bishop treats some of our largest concerns - family relationships, sexuality, war, and cultural differences - within poetry and prose that are intimate but not self-revelatory and daily but never ordinary. Elizabeth Bishop charges the moments of her writing with the desires, fears, and passions of her life.

James Merrill described Elizabeth Bishop’s poems as “more wryly radiant, more touching, more unaffectedly intelligent than any written in our lifetime” and called her “our greatest national treasure.” Robert Lowell said, “I enjoy her poems more than anybody else’s.” Long before a wider public was aware of Bishop’s work, her fellow poets expressed astonished admiration of her formal rigor, fiercely observant eye, emotional intimacy, and sometimes eccentric flights of imagination. Today she is recognized as one of America’s great poets of the twentieth century. This unprecedented collection offers a full-scale presentation of a writer of startling originality, at once passionate and reticent, adventurous and perfectionist. It presents all the poetry that Elizabeth Bishop published in her lifetime, in such classic volumes as North & South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel, and Geography III. In addition it contains an extensive selection of unpublished poems and drafts of poems (several not previously collected), as well as all her published poetic translations, ranging from a chorus from Aristophanes’ The Birds to versions of Brazilian sambas. Poems, Prose, and Letters also brings together most of her published prose writings, including stories; reminiscences; travel writing about the places (Nova Scotia, Florida, Brazil) that so profoundly marked her poetry; and literary essays and statements, including a number of pieces published here for the first time. The book is rounded out with a selection of Bishop’s irresistibly engaging and self-revelatory letters. Of the fifty-three letters included here, written between 1933 and 1979, a considerable number are printed for the first time, and all are presented in their entirety. Their recipients include Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, Anne Stevenson, May Swenson, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

A comprehensive and original guide to Elizabeth Bishop's poetry and other writing, including literary criticism and prose fictionCelebrating Elizabeth Bishop as an international writer with allegiances to various countries and national traditions, this collection of essays explores how Bishop moves between literal geographies like Nova Scotia, New England, Key West and Brazil and more philosophical categories like home and elsewhere, human and animal, insider and outsider. The book covers all aspects and periods of the author's career, from her early writing in the 1930s to the late poems finished after Geography III and those works published after her death. It also examines how Bishop's work has been read and reinterpreted by contemporary writers. Key FeaturesProvides a companion to Bishop's entire artistic oeuvre, including letter writing, literary criticism and short story writingOffers a sustained consideration of Bishop's identity politics, including the role of raceStudies Bishop's influence on contemporary culture

Gathered together for the first time, the essays in this volume were selected to give scholars ready access to important late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century contributions to scholarship on the Romantic period and twentieth-century literature and culture. Included are Charles J. Rzepka's award-winning essays on Keats's 'Chapman's Homer' sonnet and Wordsworth's 'Michael' and his critical intervention into anachronistic new historicist readings of the circumstances surrounding the composition of "Tintern Abbey." Other Romantic period essays provide innovative interpretations of De Quincey's relation to theatre and the anti-slavery movement. Genre is highlighted in Rzepka's exploration of race and region in Charlie Chan, while his interdisciplinary essay on The Wizard of Oz and the New Woman takes the reader on a journey that encompasses the Oz of L. Frank Baum and Victor Fleming as well as the professional lives of Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. Taken together, the essays provide not only a career retrospective of an influential scholar and teacher but also a map of the innovations and controversies that have influenced literary studies from the early 1980s to the present. As Peter Manning observes in his foreword, "this collection shows that even in diverse essays the force of a curious and disciplined mind makes itself felt."

This bold new theoretical study explores dissident subjectivity, that is, the struggle for unique authorial identity in American literary discourse that has existed, according to David Jarraway, since the Romantics. From Emerson’s “Experience” remarking upon the “focal distance within the actual horizon of human life” to Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize address sanctifying the artist’s “sophisticated privileged space,” American literature has continuously recognized a necessary “distance”—the gap between culturally accepted ideas of selfhood and the intractable reality of the self’s never-completed construction in time. Jarraway’s fascinating examination of modernist poets shows that engaging with this artistic space, or “going the distance,” empowers writers and their readers to create and perceive identities that resist the frozen certainties of conventional gender, sexual, and social roles. Employing this theory with grace and precision, Jarraway ranges through the dissident process in Gertrude Stein, the cultural criticism of William Carlos Williams, the deferred racialism of Langston Hughes, the queer perversities of Frank O’Hara, and the spectral lesbian poetics of Elizabeth Bishop. Bolstered further by insights from the pragmatism of William James through the cultural critique of Theodor Adorno to the queer theory of Judith Butler, the author challenges his audience with politically engaged insistence on the life-affirming potentialities of human subjectivity in literature. His passionate conclusion demonstrates the liberating fluidity of self made possible by feminist chartings of modern identity’s depths. Lucidly composed, theoretically sophisticated and up-to-the-minute, Going the Distance painstakingly recovers the dissident American subjective in modernist literary discourse within its fullest cultural context. Jarraway’s readings are a major contribution to poetry scholarship and to cultural studies that will provoke further investigations into the history of subjectivity in American literature as a whole.

The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries, which offer analyses of a given period of literary production, school, thematically constructed category, or other verse tradition that historically has been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States.

In this original contribution to Elizabeth Bishop studies, Marilyn May Lombardi uses previously unpublished materials (letters, diaries, notebooks, and unfinished poems) to shed new light on the poet’s published work. She explores the ways Bishop’s lesbianism, alcoholism, allergic illnesses, and fear of mental instability affected her poetry—the ways she translated her bodily experiences into poetic form. A cornerstone of The Body and the Song is the poet’s thirty-year correspondence with her physician, Dr. Anny Baumann, who was both friend and surrogate mother to Bishop. The letters reveal Bishop’s struggles to understand the relation between her physical and creative drives. "Dr. Anny" also helped Bishop unravel the connections in her life between psychosomatic illness and early maternal deprivation—her mother was declared incurably insane and institutionalized in 1916, when Bishop was five years old. Effectively an orphan, she spent the rest of her childhood with relatives. In addition to these letters, Lombardi uses Bishop’s unpublished notebooks to demonstrate the poet’s resolve to "face the facts"—to confront her own emotional, intellectual, and physical frailties—and translate them into poetry that is clear-eyed and economical in its form. Lombardi argues that in her subtle way, Bishop explores the same issues that preoccupy the current generation of women writers. A deeply private artist, Bishop never directly refers to her homosexuality in her published work, but the metaphors she draws from her carnal desires and aversions confront stifling cultural prescriptions for personal and erotic expression. In choosing restraint over confession, Bishop parted company with her friend Robert Lowell, but Lombardi shows that her reticence becomes a powerful artistic strategy resulting in poetry remarkable for its hermeneutic potential. Informed by recent gender criticism, Lombardi’s lucid argument advances our understanding of the ways the material circumstances of life can be transformed into art.