When W. H. Auden – thirtysomething poet, English expatriate, and new New Yorker – wrote the words “Poetry makes nothing happen,” he was mere miles from a 305-foot-tall counterexample. Poetry didn’t build the Statue of Liberty, and didn’t notably influence the statue’s French sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, or the Americans who funded and built its pedestal. But “The New Colossus” (1883), a sonnet by the Jewish American poet and humanitarian Emma Lazarus, did raise $1,500 at auction for the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund – not much, but for fourteen lines, not bad. In an inestimably greater contribution, “The New Colossus” prospectively transformed the statue into a monument to immigration, a “Mother of Exiles” from whose “beacon-hand / Glows world-wide welcome.”

Music, for too long, has been omitted in evaluations of Elizabeth Bishop – who studied piano and counterpoint for years and contemplated becoming a composer; who crossed continents with a clavichord, collecting instruments, scores, and records; and who cherished music as a profound analogue for poetry and its closest cousin among the arts. While generations of critics have given us frames for understanding Bishop as a visualist, this chapter shifts focus from her seeing to her hearing and enumerates five distinguishing characteristics of music as it appears in her work: manipulation of time, markings of place, involvement of both nature and culture, emotionally driven fantasy, and thisworldly sources. Following Bishop’s listening chronologically, as she encounters the European classical tradition, African American and Caribbean popular musics, and Brazilian folk music and samba, this chapter argues that Bishop fruitfully counterpointed music with her shifting sense of lyric poetry: sometimes music and lyrics bordered lyric; sometimes song was lyric’s unachievable opposite.

Though a prominent strand of Wallace Stevens studies argues that his poetry has neither a sense of the interpersonal nor any actual human audience to speak of, recent critics are at last taking Stevens seriously as a poet of community—a key word in recent work by several critics and a peripheral or secret subject in countless other studies. Questions of community and audience, Spaide finds, have helped these critics to reconceive both “the poem of the idea” and “the poem of the words”: critics drawn to the former have focused on Stevens’s historical and personal crises, political philosophy, aesthetics, place, and affect; those drawn to the latter have focused on Stevens’s diction, genres, forms, speakers, and lyric pronouns. Community and audience, for Stevens, are always counterbalanced by their others—individuality, impersonality, inhuman nature, aesthetic autonomy. Closing on a reading of “The Sick Man” (1950), Spaide concludes that Stevens’s truest subject is not community, not individuality, but the never-settled contest between the two.