Volume 44, Number 8 · May 15, 1997
The Many Arts of Elizabeth Bishop
By James Fenton
BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE
Exchanging Hats: Paintings
by Elizabeth Bishop, edited by William Benton
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 106 pp., $40.00
Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell
by David Kalstone, edited by Robert Hemenway, afterword by James Merrill
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 420 pp., $22.50
One Art: Letters
by Elizabeth Bishop, selected and edited by Robert Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 668 pp., $16.00 (paper)
Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It
by Brett C. Millier
University of California Press, 602 pp., $16.95 (paper)
'Feminists!' growled Elizabeth Bishop, and vaguely scandalized her 1977 Harvard class.[1] But in the same year, the year of the publication of Geography III, she also wrote a letter in which she claimed to have been a feminist since the age of six, and she was not being contradictory. It was in the late Seventies that, for instance, some creative writing classes introduced segregation of the sexes, so that the women could express their thoughts more freely. But what Bishop meant by feminism in her own case was to be taken on equal terms with any man—not to be (as she would have felt) downgraded into the category of woman poet, not to write about 'women's experience' but to take universal experience as her legitimate range, not to be used, politically, as a member of some kind of sisterhood. When she was young, she refused to be published in a group anthology when she understood that they needed a woman to make up the numbers. Throughout her life she refused to be part of all-women anthologies, and toward the end of it (she died in 1979) she might well have resented a pressure to solidarize. She was a poet's poet (John Ashbery called her a writer's writer's writer) but she was not a lesbian's lesbian.
Review, 4959 words
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