Volume 31, Number 2 · February 16, 1984
Life Studies
By Helen Vendler
The Collected Prose
by Elizabeth Bishop, edited, with an introduction, by Robert Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 278 pp., $17.50
Some poets never write prose; others, like Hardy, are better known for their prose than for their poetry. When poets do write prose, they write the sort appropriate to their nature as people. The born critics (Eliot, Berryman) write criticism; the evangelists (Shelley, Snyder) write exhortations; the narrators (Hardy, Lawrence) write fiction; the priests (Herbert, Hopkins) write sermons. These crude distinctions are made here only to say that in Elizabeth Bishop's prose we can see, even more clearly than in her poetry, some central truths about her nature as a writer. One such truth is that she was not a critic; when, for a time, she was supposed to be the poetry critic for The New Yorker, she found herself unable to write a single piece. After three years of silence, she gave it up.
Review, 2974 words
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