In letters to friends and in interviews later in life, Elizabeth Bishop repeatedly made clear her low opinion of critical writing. At the same time, much of her own criticism and review work is audacious, original and witty, particularly the long essays she completed as an undergraduate student at Vassar. She also admired the work of contemporary poet-critics like William Empson and Randall Jarrell and once pitched for the job as poetry reviewer of The New Yorker. Close analysis of her own prose and poetry demonstrates the extent to which her own writing was itself a form of informal criticism. She engaged with and incorporated the ideas and words of literary critics into her poetry throughout her career, rebuffing reductive assessments of her writing as “calm” and “modest.”

Elizabeth Bishop observed the central tensions in mid-century American poetics from a distance, which allowed her the space to resolve them in her own work in idiosyncratic and shifting ways. This chapter thus looks to her correspondence as an archive of an ad hoc poetic theory. There we see Bishop developing unique constellations of, first, the formality of accentual-syllabic verse and the flexibility of free verse and, second, a residual commitment to modernist impersonality and an emerging aesthetics of confessional disclosure. The chapter draws primarily on letters between Bishop and both Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton to advance its argument and offers readings of Bishop’s poems “Song for the Rainy Season” and “Poem” as evidence of their author’s unique engagement with mid-century poetics.

Born and buried in Worcester, Massachusetts, Bishop’s peripatetic life found its physical and temperamental hub in New England. Bishop lived in Massachusetts for the greater portion of her childhood and adolescence. Though she traveled widely and lived for years in Brazil, she continued to perceive the novelty of “elsewhere” as a native “New-Englander-herring-choker-bluenoser.” This chapter examines the ways in which the New England region informed Bishop’s imagination. The Atlantic shoreline remained a lifelong fascination, a way of reckoning with time, caprice and power in poems such as ”Wading at Wellfleet” and ”The End of March.” Further inland, Bishop’s poem ”In the Waiting Room” and story ”The Country Mouse” articulate disorientation and recognition in a rich tapestry of epiphany, narrative and social critique, a mode she revisits poignantly in the poem ”Five Flights Up.” Returning to Massachusetts for a teaching post at Harvard University in 1970, Bishop stayed in New England for most of the last decade of her life.