“Elizabeth Bishop and Postmodernism,” in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, Fall, 1995, pp. 166-79.

In the following essay, Page examines Bishop's place in the era of literature spanning from modernism to postmodernism.

Though Elizabeth Bishop is a near-contemporary whose life and career have by now been well documented, she has proved curiously elusive to scholars attempting to place her among her poetic forebears and successors. This is partly owing to the delayed recognition of her work and her extraordinary posthumous fluorescence, but I shall argue that it is also partly owing to continuities among successive generations of poets that have been less well recognized than the differences among them. A further difficulty in placing Bishop securely in literary historical time, however, stems from conflicts among scholars over the segmentation and definition of poetic periods from the romantic era to our own. In this essay, I shall first examine...