Poetry can be intensely personal - the most intense form of communication ever invented: one person implanting his thoughts or sensations, through the device of a construction of words that have both euphonic and mnemonic power, in the mind of the reader. So why would an obviously gifted writer - like Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) - try to use poetry to hide herself?
Bishop expressed her distaste for "confessional" poetry - just the sort of poetry her dear fiend Robert Lowell was writing under pressure from the new generation of poets in the Sixties who introduced a frankness (though it was far from new) to modern poetry. Women poets, in particular, like Sylvia Plath, hung out their most delicate, blood-stained laundry in public, whether or not that public cared to see it or even understood the private traumas on display. Philip Larkin wrote about his sex life, but always in an ironic, self-deprecating manner. Robert Lowell actually incorporated phrases from an ex-wife's letters to him in his poems, and Bishop told him he had gone too far.
Concealment was Bishop's defense against a lifetime of losing: her father at eight months old, then her mother's crack-up, the beautiful hiatus with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, her embargo to her other, wealthier grandparents in Worcester, Massachusetts when she was six and then to her Aunt Maud outside Boston (where her uncle abused her). She wrote her first poems at the age of eight.
The details of her life are all public knowledge now. Bishop loved women. So did Adrienne Rich (eventually), Amy Clampitt, Mary Oliver. Now they write papers about her as a victim of abuse, as a closeted lesbian, as an alcoholic, and even that broadest of categories, as a woman poet. Despite efforts to enlist her in the cause of women's liberation in the Sixties, she resisted being classified as a woman poet, and would've been appalled at all the current fuss over her love affairs. She would hate how everyone voluntarily surrenders to the eradication of privacy on social media. She was, by any standard, antisocial.
Early in her adult life, an inheritance from her father's family set her free. She travelled. She confessed to enjoying exile. Her poetry appeared gradually, and her celebrity as a poet grew. She was a close friend of Robert Lowell until his death at 60 from a heart attack in a New York taxi. She eulogized him (In Memoriam) in her poem "North Haven":
Years ago, you told me it was here
(in 1932?) you first "discovered girls"
and learned to sail, and learned to kiss.
You had "such fun," you said, that classic summer.
("Fun"--it always seemed to leave you at a loss...)
You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,
afloat in mystic blue...And now--you've left
for good. You can't derange, or rearrange,
your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.)
The words won't change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.
Their correspondence is one of the most moving, enlightening, and entertaining collection of letters ever assembled. She found the love of her life, Lota de Maceda Soares, on a whimsical journey to Brazil. It didn't stop her from questioning her motives for travelling:
Questions of Travel
There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
-For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.
Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?
But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
-Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
-A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
-Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
-Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
-And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:
"ls it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?
Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . .. No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"
That last question wasn't rhetorical, especially the "wherever that may be?". Responding to her growing prestige in the States, she returned home, and eventually (after Lota came to visit her and killed herself with sleeping pills) took over a poetry teaching post at Harvard vacated by Lowell. In her sixties, it was in Cambridge that she met her last love. And in almost losing her (she came back), in 1975, Bishop wrote the "villanelle" for which she is best known:
ONE ART
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
— Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love)
I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Beautifully, the "disaster" was averted - her last love returned to Bishop, and was with her when she was found dead of an aneurysm. But losing her wouldn't have come as a surprise to someone so practiced in loss. She told Robert Lowell (who would die two years before her) , “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.” The words on her tombstone, from her poem "The Bight," now read, "All the untidy activity continues, / awful but cheerful".
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