Elizabeth Bishop Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Thomas Travisano

Critical Essay by Thomas Travisano

SOURCE: Travisano, Thomas. “The Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon.” New Literary History 26, no. 4 (autumn 1995): 903-30.

In the following essay, Travisano examines the sudden rise in the critical opinion of Bishop as one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.

In a 1955 review of “The Year in Poetry” for Harper's, Randall Jarrell composed a notice of Elizabeth Bishop's latest book that would prove prophetic in more ways than one. He began:

Sometimes when I can't go to sleep at night I see the family of the future. Dressed in three-toned shorts-and-shirt sets of disposable Papersilk, they sit before the television wall of their apartment, only their eyes moving. After I've looked a while I always see—otherwise I'd die—a pigheaded soul over in the corner with a book; only his eyes are moving, but in them there is a different look.

Usually it's Homer he's holding—this week it's Elizabeth Bishop. Her Poems seems to me one of the best books an American poet has ever written: the people of the future (the ones in the corner) will read her just as they will read Dickinson or Whitman or Stevens, or the other classical American poets still alive among us.¹

Despite breathless predictions, Papersilk never really went anywhere, but the universal television wall has nearly made it, awaiting only the high-resolution digital TV signal to begin its inevitable march into the American home. However, Jarrell's most prophetic vision was to foresee that “pigheaded soul over in the corner” holding Elizabeth Bishop. Just as Jarrell anticipated, many of those pigheaded children of the television age who are still holding onto Homer or Dickinson or Whitman or Stevens have come to value, and with like intensity, that most understated and mysteriously inward of mid-century American poets, Elizabeth Bishop.

When Jarrell composed his review forty years ago, the prediction he made seemed bold indeed, for Elizabeth Bishop,...
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