Elizabeth Bishop S Prosaic

Elizabeth Bishop is now recognized as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century—a uniquely cosmopolitan writer with connections to the US, Canada, Brazil, and also the UK, given her neglected borrowings from many English authors, and her strong influence on modern British verse. Yet the dominant biographical/psychoanalytical approach leaves her style relatively untouched—and it is vital that an increasing focus on archival material does not replace our attention to the writing itself. Bishop’s verse is often compared with prose (sometimes insultingly); writing fiction, she worried she was really writing poems. But what truly is the difference between poetry and prose—structurally, conceptually, historically speaking? Is prose simply formalized speech, or does it have rhythms of its own? Ravinthiran seeks an answer to this question through close analysis of Bishop’s prose-like verse, her literary prose, her prose poems, and her letter prose. This title is a provocation. It demands that we reconsider the pejorative quality of the word prosaic; playing on mosaic, Ravinthiran uses Bishop’s thinking about prose to approach—for the first time—her work in multiple genres as a stylistic whole. Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic is concerned not only with her inimitable style, but also larger questions to do with the Anglo-American shift from closed to open forms in the twentieth century. This study identifies not just borrowings from, but rich intertextual relationships with, writers as diverse as—among others—Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, and Dorothy Richardson. (Though Bishop criticized Woolf, she in particular is treated as a central and thus far neglected precursor, crucial to our understanding of Bishop as a feminist poet.) Finally, the sustained discussion of how the history of prose frames effects of rhythm, syntax, and acoustic texture—in both Bishop’s prose proper and her prosaic verse—extends a body of research which seeks now to treat literature as a form of cognition. Technique and thought are finely wedded in Bishop’s work—her literary forms evince a historical intelligence attuned to questions of power, nationality, tradition (both literary and otherwise), race, and gender.

Elizabeth Bishop and the Music of Literature brings together the latest understandings of how central music was to Bishop’s writing. This collection considers Bishop’s reworking of metrical and rhythmic forms of poetry; the increasing presence of prosaic utterances into speech-soundscapes; how musical poetry intones new modes of thinking through aural vision; how Bishop transforms traditionally distasteful tones of violence, banality, and commerce into innovative poetry; how her diverse, lifelong musical education (North American, European, Brazilian) affects her work; and also how her diverse musical settings have inspired global contemporary composers. The essays flesh out the missing elements of music, sound, and voice in previous research that are crucial to understanding how Bishop’s writing continues to dazzle readers and inspire artists in surprising ways.

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

In poetry, the constraints of language and the tension between desire and possibility constitute the problematic in which the poem occurs. Approaching Elizabeth Bishop's work from the standpoint of this problematic, C.K. Doreski's illuminating study examines Bishop's rhetorical strategies and the way they shape the formal and thematic movements of her poetry and stories. Unlike other recent studies of Bishop, Doreski's does not concern itself primarily with her visual imagery, but rather deals with her poetry as a series of linguistic maneuverings designed to create the maximum illusion of representation while resisting the romantic devices of self-revelation and solipsistic narration. Though highly personal in nature, Bishop's works exhibit her success in averting, with formal and rhetorical dexterity, the temptations of sentiment. Doreski argues that Bishop takes advantage of the inadequacies of language, and with a postmodern sense of limitation explores the gaps and silences narrative must bridge with the mundane - the patently inadequate - creating an air of emotional intimacy without committing itself to the banality of full exposure. In essence, she asserts, the restraints of language shaped the tone, tensions, and even the topics of Bishop's poetry. This study finds the poems and stories mutually illuminating, but while moving back and forth among her various works, acknowledges the intelligent ordering of the volumes Bishop published in her lifetime. Persuasively arguing that restraint for Bishop is an essential element in the relationship she finds between language and life, this study shows how through her poems and stories she attempts to invent a language adequate to herperception.

As the figure of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) becomes so entrenched in the Modernist canon that he serves as a major reference point for poets and critics alike, the time has come to investigate poetry and poetics after him. The ambiguity of the preposition is intentional: while after may refer neutrally to chronological sequence, it also implies ways of aesthetically modeling poetry on a predecessor. Likewise, the general heading of poetry and poetics allows the sixteen contributors to this volume to range far and wide in terms of poetics (from postwar formalists to poets associated with various strands of Postmodernism, Language poetry, even Confessional poetry), ethnic identities (with a diverse selection of poets of color), nationalities (including the Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and several English poets), or language (sidestepping into French and Czech poetry). Besides offering a rich harvest of concrete case studies, Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens also reconsiders possibilities for talking about poetic influence. How can we define and refine the ways in which we establish links between earlier and later poems? At what level of abstraction do such links exist? What have we learned from debates about competing poetic eras and traditions? How is our understanding of an older writer reshaped by engaging with later ones? And what are we perhaps not paying attention to-aesthetically, but also politically, historically, thematically-when we relate contemporary poetry to someone as idiosyncratic as Stevens?

How did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Midcentury Suspension argues that a sense of suspension—a feeling of being between beginnings and endings, recent horrors and opaque horizons—shaped transatlantic literary forms and cultural expression in this singular moment. Rooted in extensive archival research in literary, print, and public cultures of the Anglophone North Atlantic, Claire Seiler’s account of midcentury suspension ranges across key works of the late 1940s and early 1950s by authors such as W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bowen, Ralph Ellison, and Frank O’Hara. Seiler reveals how these writers cultivated modes of suspension that spoke to the felt texture of life at midcentury. Running counter to the tendency to frame midcentury literature in the terms of modernism or of our contemporary, Midcentury Suspension reorients twentieth-century literary study around the epoch’s fraught middle.

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.