Bonnie Costello

Elizabeth Bishop's Impersonal Personal

This article confronts the persistent argument that Elizabeth Bishop’s poems are autobiographical, and the implicit assumption that the self and tradition are unitary and contending realities. It calls for a shift toward generic and rhetorical models of lyric subjectivity that remove voice from identity while still allowing for a connection between the poem and history. The article discusses reception of “Crusoe in England” (Complete Poems 162– 68) as a focused instance of the critical tendency to absorb voice into author, and vice versa. It presents the poem instead as a configuration of various social impulses struggling toward transition, and as a meditation on the very problem of negotiating a relation between particular experience and the generalities of language.

Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop: Friendship and Influence

Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop claimed not to understand the critical inclination to compare them in reviews and articles, and on many occasions dismissed anything more than juvenile and superficial resemblances. Reporting one such conversation with a critic, Moore wrote to Bishop (June 21, 1959): You have sometimes asked what I thought, Elizabeth; but even if you ever took my advice, did you ever get to sound like me? or I like you? You sound like Lope de Vega and I sound like Jacob Abbot or Peter Rabbit.1

Marianne Moore and the Old Masters

Most of the scholarship on Marianne Moore and the visual arts has concentrated on her modernist period during the second and third decades of the twentieth century, when she drew inspiration from the formal innovations and metacognitive preoccupations of contemporary art. Modernism emphasized idiosyncratic structures and the unique vision of the poet. Moore was never a “pure poet” in the twenties or a protest poet in the thirties, but she did think about the civic function of poetry. In the thirties she sought to reach an audience with accessible scenes and objects. Eventually Moore drew on the tradition of Western representational art and invoked its greatest authorities to connect with the past rather than break with it. In this way Moore conveyed knowledge that was not exclusively her own—even as she offered unique ways of seeing to both expose the flaws of contemporary culture and foster a community of understanding.

Finding Moore: No Search Engines, No Indexes, No Computers

Costello looks back on her career as a leading Marianne Moore scholar, from the 1980s to the present.

John Ashbery: Selected Prose (review)

“I am tempted simply to call her our greatest modern poet,” wrote John Ashbery in 1967, in a review of Marianne Moore’s The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (108). One feels the same temptation now before his own remarkable body of work. Certainly he is our greatest living poet. For many years, even after winning wide recognition for his poetry, Ashbery worked as an arts journalist. So it is fitting and good that Eugene Richie has made a selection of these sundry writings which, together with Reported Sightings and Other Traditions, comprise the bulk of his achievement in nonfiction prose. We can look forward, I hope, to a Selected Letters to complete the picture. There is a long, distinguished tradition of modern poets’ prose, as Ashbery reminds us, quoting, intermittently, from Eliot, Auden, Breton, Moore, Stevens, Jarrell, and others. In the most enduring works in this tradition the poet sets down his poetics and articulates a relation between the poet and society. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Stevens’ “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” Auden’s “The Poet and the City,” have shaped our understanding not only of their verse, but of their time. Those looking to Ashbery’s prose for a manifesto, an apologia, or really any strong generalizing or summing up of his poetic purposes may be disappointed in this collection. We are reminded of his remark concerning Marianne Moore, that universality and depth are not the same. I refer the reader to the generalizing power of Ashbery’s poetry, which abounds in splendid, if enigmatic, meditations on his art. But beware the proposition that sounds like an ars poetica; what appears stable in Ashbery usually slithers away as we approach it. He has not used the prose form to instruct the world on his principles of composition or his philosophy of poetry. On the contrary, one finds this Houdini deftly escaping all such critical entrapments. He resists self-description and attends for the most part to particular artists or writers and their work, with little compulsion to create a platform for theory. Nevertheless, the astute reader may extract from this volume, as from Other Traditions (his Norton lectures) and even Reported Sightings (his collection of art commentaries) much to sustain interest beyond the particular example at hand. As with other poets’ prose, what is said in passing, or in the observation of a favorite artist’s work, reflects back on the poet’s own practice. Ashbery, more than anyone, knows that every portrait is a mirror. For years, in teaching “the impossible” Ashbery, I have referred my students to his early description of “the impossible” Gertrude Stein:

Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery

Active displacements in perspective attractive mortality imaginary heights, invisible depths excursive sight memorys eye art as commemoration epilogue - maps and mirrors.