Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
Summary
Elizabeth Bishop's poetic diet was typical for the poets of her generation: her grandfather's recitations of Burns, supplemented by her own reading in the family library of the romantics and the Victorians, were followed by the thrill of the modernists, when in 1923 she received a gift of the Harriet Monroe anthology, The New Poetry. At Vassar from 1930 through 1934, she learned her moderns and, in proper Eliotian/New Critical fashion, read and loved Donne, Herbert, and Hopkins. And, like many of her contemporaries, she inherited the legacy of the modern poets, as her own poetry was departing from it. When she defined her position it was to ally herself with the “late-late Post World War I generation,” because “I went to Europe earlier than most of my ‘contemporary’ poets – and I am a few years older than some of them” (letter to Stevenson, 20 Mar. 1963, WU). She wrestled in the mid-1930s with questions raised by modern poets and philosophers about the materiality of poetic language. Yet her poetry is generationally apart from the moderns' stylistic experimentation, tonal impersonality, and ideological effort to “make it new.” But it is also unlike the poetry of her contemporaries. She never wrote poetic applications of New Critical methodologies, as did the Fugitives; neither did she feel anxiety over the moderns' influence, nor the weight of American history, as did the early Lowell, who was an intimate friend of hers.
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- Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy , pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993