Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-tr9hg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-15T01:28:26.719Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - More Delicate Than the Historian's Are the Map-Maker's Colors: Correspondences between Lowell's Poetics of History and Bishop's Poetics of Space

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2019

Boris Vejdovsky
Affiliation:
PHD, teaches American literature and American studies at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
Get access

Summary

“CAL” AND “ELIZABETH” are what Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop called each other in their lifelong correspondence, which “offers a window on the breakdowns and depressions that characterized both poets’ lives, and the sense of personal tragedy they shared over the course of their thirty-year friendship.” In an early letter of a correspondence that would fill the eight hundred pages of their complete letters, Lowell responds to what can be described as poetic courting by Bishop. In a flirtatious tone that reciprocates that of Bishop's initial letter, Lowell establishes that his pen pal “must be called [Elizabeth],” and that he is “called Cal.” He adds that he “won't explain why” and that none of the prototypes are flattering: “Calvin, Caligula, Caliban, Calvin Coolidge.” The facetious and alliterative list ends with a quip: Lowell adds, “Calligraphy—with merciless irony,” thus evoking Elizabeth Bishop's handwriting that he found difficult to decipher. These early letters show, as Thomas Travisano has proposed, that the two poets were attracted to each other by their “shared experience of outsiderhood,” and it can be argued that they couched this attraction to each other “by resignifying terms of normalcy” that combined romantic attraction and professional interests. However, the ostensibly platonic literary exchange of “words in air” of this “queer couple” was also a place of correspondence and divergence between two poetics that responded to the poetic crisis of sense after modernism. In what follows, I propose to examine the correspondences between what I shall be referring to as Lowell's poetics of history and Bishop's poetics of space. I do not intend to place them in stark contrast, let alone adjudicate on the poetic superiority of one over the over, but rather to indicate that these two poetics encapsulate the possibilities of post-modernist responses to the crisis of modernism. By rewriting the last line of Bishop's poem “The Map,” I wish to suggest that these two poetics can be likened to what Bishop calls in that poem the work of the geographer and the historian. History and geography are two ways of investigating an individual's position in time and space and they need one another in order to develop, though their correspondences can only happen “in air.”

Type
Chapter
Information
Robert Lowell in a New Century
European and American Perspectives
, pp. 67 - 80
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×