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A NGU S C LEGHOR N A ND J ONAT HA N ELLIS

Introduction: North and South

Elizabeth Bishop (191131979) published relatively few poems in her life-

time, at least compared to more prolioc peers such as John Berryman and
Anne Sexton, or her close friend, Robert Lowell. The four main collections
published in her lifetime 3 North & South (1946), A Cold Spring (1955),
Questions of Travel (1965), and Geography III (1976) 3 contain just sev-
enty-eight poems (seventy-ove if you count <Four Poems= as a single poem),
none of them particularly long. Admired for her descriptive powers and the
apparent modesty of her poetic persona, Bishop was not quite a Modernist
or a confessional poet. At times she appeared an early Postmodernist, but in
a completely different register from Language poetry. Indeed, it was not until
James Longenbach9s Modern Poetry after Modernism (1997) that Bishop9s
centrality within the main shifts and tensions of twentieth-century poetry
began to be understood. In historical terms, she is one of the few poets to
link the Modern and the Postmodern, Primitive art and Surrealism. A res-
ident in both North and South America, where she owned but lost at least
<three loved houses= (P 198), she was also an Anglophile who lived in and
wrote about her travels in Europe. She explored free verse and traditional
verse forms with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, Spanish poetry with
Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz, and translated Portuguese literature while
living in Brazil, passing on these lessons directly to younger poets such as
May Swenson and James Merrill. Her poems speak of life and death in
what she calls in one poem an <indrawn breath, / half groan, half accep-
tance= (P 172). At the same time, no detail is ever <too small= for her var-
ious peripheral speakers (P 131), many of them animals and children. At
the beginning of the twenty-orst century, her poetry seems, if anything, even
more contemporary than during her lifetime, a process facilitated in part
by the numerous posthumous publications of her work, but mainly by the
sheer originality and variety of her writing.
Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1911. She lost her father
to Bright9s disease when she was only eight months old and her mother

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to mental illness soon afterward. Between April 1915 and October 1917,
Bishop lived with her maternal grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia,
where her mother also lived between breakdowns. The autobiographical
story, <In the Village= (1953), recreates two of her most haunting memo-
ries from this time: that of her mother9s scream and of the <beautiful pure
sound= of the blacksmith9s anvil that clangs <like a bell-buoy out at sea=
(Pr 77, 78). Poems such as <Manners,= <Sestina,= and <First Death in Nova
Scotia= also revisit these childhood experiences. Bishop9s imaginative preoc-
cupation with the idea of home was arguably one of her main inheritances
from childhood. Her poems, as Adrienne Rich once recognized, are full of
outsiders for whom the idea of home is precisely that 3 only an idea. These
include the old hermit in <Chemin de Fer,= left to fend for himself by the side
of his <little pond= (P 10); the <specklike= children in <Squatter9s Children,=
waiting for the rain to wash away their <specklike house= (P 93); and the
gardener in <Manuelzinho,= forced to sniff and shiver, <hat in hand= (P 95),
for a shot of penicillin.
Although Bishop9s poems avoid direct political statement, she continually
keeps account of the practical consequences of historical events for indi-
vidual people. She saw <A Miracle for Breakfast= as a <Depression poem=
(Conversations 25), <Songs for a Colored Singer= as <a prophesy, or prayer,
that justice will eventually triumph for the Negro in the USA= (qtd. in
Harrison, Elizabeth Bishop 168), and <From Trollope9s Journal= as <an anti-
Eisenhower poem= (WIA 594). In <In the Waiting Room,= she recalls the
experience of being a child during World War I. In <Roosters,= she reports
from Key West during the buildup to World War II; <12 O9Clock News= is
one of the great twentieth-century poems about the reporting of war.
A few months before graduating from Vassar, Bishop met Marianne
Moore for the orst time on a bench outside the reading room of the New
York Public Library (see Bishop9s memoir, <Efforts of Affection=). The two
poets enjoyed a generous friendship, encouraging each other9s writing in
spite of the occasional disagreement, most famously over the subject matter
of Bishop9s <Roosters,= a poem Moore and her mother wanted to rename,
<The Cock.= North & South, Bishop9s orst book of poems, was published in
1946. It took its perfectionist author more than a decade to complete, a pat-
tern repeated with each of her subsequent collections. Bishop was in Nova
Scotia on the day North & South was published, returning south by bus to
Boston, the journey that would later become the setting for one of her great-
est poems, <The Moose.= The following year, Randall Jarrell introduced
Bishop to Robert Lowell, who became a lifelong friend. <I loved him at orst
sight,= she later admitted, <my shyness vanished and we started talking at
once= (WIA 809). In 1951, Bishop visited South America, where an allergy

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Introduction: North and South

to the fruit of a cashew tree caused her to fall ill. Bedridden at the home
of her hostess, Lota de Macedo Soares, a Brazilian architect and landscape
designer whom she had orst met in New York ten years earlier, Bishop was
overwhelmed by the care she received and, at Macedo Soares9s invitation,
decided to stay. The two women fell in love. Bishop9s asthma and drinking
seemed to come under control and she began to write nuently again, after
several years of stuttering activity. Her prose masterpiece, <In the Village,=
was completed in 1953 and her second collection of poems, A Cold Spring
(1955), soon followed, earning her the Pulitzer Prize. Bishop kept in touch
by letter with Moore and Lowell, while at the same time corresponding with
new friends such as Ilse Barker and Flannery O9Connor. She translated The
Diary of <Helena Morley= by Alice Brant in 1957 and was the co-editor and
a co-translator of An Anthology of Brazilian Poetry with Emanuel Brasil in
1972. Questions of Travel, her third collection of poems, appeared in 1965.
Bishop9s relationship with Macedo Soares grew distant, and in September
1967, Macedo Soares died of an overdose during a trip to see Bishop in New
York. In Bishop9s papers, she left drafts for an elegiac poem, although she
never onished it.
After Macedo Soares9s death, Bishop drifted between San Francisco, Ouro
Preto (Brazil), and New England. In 1970, she began teaching at Harvard.
Bishop9s fear of losing her partner at the time, Alice Methfessel, prompted
the magniocent villanelle, <One Art.= In 1974, Bishop moved into a condo-
minium overlooking Lewis Wharf in Boston. She kept a ship9s log beside
the window, documenting the vessels that came to port and thinking it
<curious= that ships from Nova Scotia must have docked there, perhaps
even her great-grandfather9s. Her last book of poems, Geography III (1976),
also revisits Nova Scotia, particularly <Poem= and <The Moose.= In the last
decade of her life, Bishop became friends with Frank Bidart, Octavio Paz,
Lloyd Schwartz, and Helen Vendler, poets and scholars who kept her repu-
tation buoyant in the immediate aftermath of her death in 1979.

<All Those Rich Unonished Fragments . . .=

Bishop authorized the orst Complete Poems in 1969, adding two new sec-
tions, <Translations from the Portuguese= and <New and Uncollected Work,=
to the three main collections then in print. In an ecstatic review for The New
York Review of Books, John Ashbery hoped that the title was <an error and
that there will be more poems and at least another Complete Poems= (<The
Complete Poems= 201). Four years after her death, Robert Giroux and oth-
ers supplemented her orst selection with the publication of The Complete
Poems, 192731979 (1983). The second Complete Poems contains Bishop9s

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last collection, Geography III, four late poems uncollected at the time of
her death (<Santarém,= <North Haven,= <Pink Dog,= and <Sonnet=), and
three further sections, <Uncollected Poems,= <Poems Written in Youth,= and
<Translations.= The book begins with a <Publisher9s Note,= the orst para-
graph of which is worth citing in full:

This book contains all of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, from <Behind
Stowe= and <To a Tree,= written at sixteen, which appeared in the Walnut
Hill School magazine in 1927, to <Sonnet,= published in The New Yorker
after her death in 1979. She would not have reprinted the seventeen poems
written in her youth; she was too severe a critic of her own work. Yet the
variety and range of these early poems are part of her poetic develop-
ment. Her attitude toward her work was at times unpredictable: she never
reprinted <Exchanging Hats,= a poem that belongs among her best. First
published in New World Writing in 1956, it appears here with <Uncollected
Poems (1979).= The background of <Pleasure Seas,= which appears here for
the orst time, is odd. Written in 1939, it was accepted by Harper9s Bazaar
but never printed; the sole surviving copy was found among her papers. In
the group of occasional poems, there are four which she enclosed in letters
to Marianne Moore in the mid-thirties. It was Miss Moore who arranged
for her orst publication in book form in an anthology, Trial Balances (1935).
(The Complete Poems, 192731979 xi)

This contradictory narrative suggests that while Bishop had a famously scru-
pulous eye for revising poetry and <the daily necessity of getting it right,=
as Wallace Stevens puts it, she could also be haphazard about her material,
and was vulnerable to rejection. The brief reference to <her papers= hints at
more poems to be found, as did the discovery of four <occasional poems= in
letters to Marianne Moore. In addition to bibliographical information about
the background to <Pleasure Seas= and the orst publication of <Exchanging
Hats,= the publisher9s note also contains implicit criticism of Bishop for
being <too severe a critic of her own work.= In his essay for this volume
(Chapter 9), Lloyd Schwartz notes that she often had second thoughts about
her love poems, particularly when The New Yorker rejected them. The list
of poems rejected or not sent to The New Yorker 3 <Faustina, or Rock
Roses= (rejected), <Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance=
(rejected), <O Breath= (rejected), <The Shampoo= (rejected), <Exchanging
Hats= (rejected), <It is marvellous to wake up together,= <Edgar Allan Poe
& The Juke-Box,= <Apartment in Leme,= <A Drunkard,= <Vague Poem
(Vaguely love poem),= <For Grandfather,= and <Breakfast Song= (all not
sent) 3 might itself form an astonishing collection of poetry. Indeed, the best
of Alice Quinn9s 2006 edition of Bishop9s uncollected poems, drafts, and
fragments consists largely of this material.

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As <The Publisher9s Note= coyly implies 3 for all its talk of containing <all
of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop= (our emphasis) 3 The Complete Poems was
very much a provisional volume. Bishop had not just published more poems
than the note acknowledged; <her papers= contained more than 3,500 pages
of unpublished material, much of it poetry. Robert Lowell, who had only an
inkling of what Bishop kept back, once commented enviously on <all those
rich unonished fragments, such a fortune in the bank= (WIA 489). Bishop9s
onal <fortune= was left not just in boxes and notebooks deposited at Vassar
College, but also in folders and shoe boxes entrusted to close friends such
as Linda Nemer in Brazil, not to mention the hundreds of letters she sent
to famous and non-famous correspondents and the brittle paintings and
shadow boxes she regularly gifted to friends. One poem even turned up in
the dedication to a cookbook (P 321). Another recently showed up in the
end papers of her Modern Library edition of Jude the Obscure, found by
chance in a nea market in Adamstown, Pennsylvania (Beards <Introducing
Elizabeth Bishop=). Might further discoveries be waiting in other friends9
attics? Recent additions to the Elizabeth Bishop Collection at Vassar College
and a forthcoming edition of Bishop9s Notebooks show the now has not
abated. Bishop liked the idea not just of sharing work with others, but also
of sharing the responsibility of what to do with that work afterward. When
asked by Anne Stevenson about publishing, she replied: <I9m rather against
professionalism . . . and really often think I would have preferred the days
when poems just got handed around among friends= (NYr vii3viii). In a
similar spirit, her will instructed her literary executors, Alice Methfessel and
Frank Bidart, to <determine whether any of my unpublished manuscripts and
papers shall be published and, if so, to see them through the press, and with
power generally to administer my literary property= (Elizabeth Bishop in
the Twenty-First Century 2). As Lloyd Schwartz recently observed in answer
to Helen Vendler9s complaint about the recent appearance of unpublished
poems: <Bishop never really 8repudiated9 most of her drafts. If anything, she
was quite prepared for their posthumous publication= (<Elizabeth Bishop9s
8Finished9 Unpublished Poems= 54).
In addition to poetry, Bishop also left behind several prose works, includ-
ing memoirs, short stories, art criticism, book reviews, and blurbs, many of
which were published in The Collected Prose (1984), edited, like the major-
ity of The Complete Poems, by Robert Giroux. The publication of both
books certainly kept Bishop9s writing in the public eye, leading to important
reassessments of her work by Adrienne Rich, Eavan Boland, Thom Gunn,
Seamus Heaney, and James Fenton, among others. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil
Estess9s edited collection, Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (1983), also played
its part. It included a typically strident foreword by Harold Bloom in which

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he claimed Bishop as a rival to Wallace Stevens, if only <the shorter works=

(<Foreword= ix). Brett Millier9s 1993 biography, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and
the Memory of It, and Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau9s collection of oral
material brought Bishop9s life into focus, as did important book-length stud-
ies by Thomas Travisano (1988), David Kalstone (1989), Lorrie Goldensohn
(1992), Victoria Harrison (1993), Susan McCabe (1994), and Marilyn May
Lombardi (1995). The orst edition of her correspondence, One Art: Letters
(1994), undoubtedly attracted a larger readership, as to a lesser extent did
the publication of William Benton9s Exchanging Hats: Elizabeth Bishop
Paintings in 1996.
In the past few years, two further editions of Bishop9s letters have
appeared, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth
Bishop and Robert Lowell in 2008 and Elizabeth Bishop and The New
Yorker in 2011. Few twentieth-century poets have as many letters in print.
No other twentieth-century poet has received as much praise for his or her
correspondence. In one of the most detailed responses to One Art, Tom
Paulin described its publication as <a historic event, a bit like discovering a
new planet or watching a bustling continent emerge, glossy and triumphant
from the blank ocean. Here is an immense cultural treasure being suddenly
unveiled 3 and this hefty selection is only the beginning. Before the millen-
nium is out, Bishop will be seen as one of this century9s epistolary geniuses=
(<Writing to the Moment= 215). Although the majority of critics still privi-
lege Bishop9s poetry over her prose because poetry in general is privileged
over letter writing, it is important to recognize her unusually original gifts
as a correspondent. Bishop saw letter writing both <as an art form= (OA
544) and as a way of staying in touch with friends. Its informal formality
suited Bishop perfectly, particularly the emphasis on making everyday chat-
ter not just funny, but also signiocant 3 what Lowell memorably character-
ized as her ability for making <the casual perfect= (WIA vii). Great poets,
it is worth reminding ourselves, are not automatically great letter writers.
Indeed, great poet-correspondents such as Keats or Hopkins are very much
the exception that proves the rule. Siobhan Phillips devotes an entire chapter
to Bishop9s epistolary voice in this book, including a fascinating insight into
what she terms <correspondent politics,= although every contributor has
cause to cite from the letters at some point.
Alice Quinn9s 2006 edition of Bishop9s writing, Edgar Allan Poe & The
Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, is without doubt the
most controversial posthumous publication to date. Its contents include

wistful and comic poems Bishop wrote in high school; poems begun soon after
college, renecting her passion for Elizabethan verse and surrealist technique;
love poems and dream fragments from the 1930s and 940s; poems about her

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Canadian childhood; poems she was working on into the late 1970s, begun
decades before; and many other works that have hitherto been quoted almost
exclusively in biographical and critical studies.= (EAP)

While much of this material has been absorbed into the Library of America
edition of Bishop9s Poems, Prose, and Letters (2008) and the centenary edi-
tions of Bishop9s Poems (2011) and Prose (2011), critics continue to debate
the merits not just of individual drafts and poems, but even of publish-
ing them in the orst place. Some of these debates have been aired already,
in Helen Vendler9s New Republic review of Edgar Allan Poe, in newspa-
per reviews of Poems and Prose, and, more recently, in Elizabeth Bishop in
the Twenty-First Century: Reading the New Editions (2012). Contributors
to this volume help further the debate, most notably in an essay by Lorrie
Goldensohn (Chapter 12), which makes the case for keeping any conclusions
about the posthumous material tentative: <As the decades begin their slow,
volcanic accumulation over this body of poetry, so must our critical reception
of it heave and realign.= For Charles Simic: <What these uncollected works
lay bare for me is how much emotion there was in Bishop9s poems to start
with, which her endless tinkering tended to obscure in the end. It has made
me read her published work differently, discovering intimate elegies and love
poems where I previously heard only an anonymous voice= (19).

<Waiting to Be Found=
Bishop was not considered a major poet during her lifetime, even though her
poems were read fairly widely and even taught in several universities. She
was, in John Ashbery9s famous phrase, not even a poet9s poet, but <a writer9s
writer9s writer= (Schwartz and Estess xviii). Fellow writers of various schools
and traditions have always loved Bishop9s writing, probably because she
never belonged to any school or tradition herself. Too young to be consid-
ered a Modernist, Bishop nevertheless corresponded with Marianne Moore,
interviewed T. S. Eliot, and was a regular visitor to Ezra Pound during his
cononement at St. Elizabeths Hospital. Too reticent to have anything to do
with the confessional movement, she nevertheless innuenced the composi-
tion of Lowell9s seminal collection, Life Studies (1959), and was admired
by many confessional poets, particularly Plath and Sexton. The latter sent
her a fan letter, as did John Ashbery. Other New York School poets, chieny
James Schuyler, similarly loved her work. Thom Gunn and Robert Duncan
both enjoyed her company in the late 1960s, as did Seamus Heaney, James
Merrill, and Octavio Paz in the 1970s. Anne Stevenson, who wrote the orst
book-length study of Bishop9s poetry in 1966, may not have become a poet
without her. May Swenson, Frank Bidart, Jane Shore, and others all beneoted
7

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from her personal encouragement and practical advice. If poets agreed on

anything during Bishop9s lifetime, which they seldom did, they agreed on
rating Bishop9s poetry highly. And so, although Bishop traveled a great deal
during her lifetime and lived outside of North America for at least twenty
years, the literary establishment never forgot her. She was appointed poetry
consultant in Washington in 1949 when just thirty-eight years old. She did
not miss out on any fellowships or prizes, either. Her many awards included
a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and the
Neustadt International Prize for Literature. And yet at the time of her death,
of a cerebral aneurysm in October 1979, Bishop9s poetry was very much in
the shadow of Lowell and Plath and most of her poetic peers. James Merrill
called her <our greatest national treasure= (Schwartz and Estess 243), but he
did not speak for everyone, and certainly not for most contemporary poetry
readers.
<I envy the mind hiding in her words,= wrote Mary McCarthy four years
after Bishop9s death in 1983, <like an 8I9 counting up to a hundred wait-
ing to be found= (<Symposium= 267). For McCarthy, as for many readers,
Bishop9s mind, equivalent to but not identical to an autobiographical voice,
is somehow there and not there in her poems, the act of reading them akin to
a game of hide-and-seek. Objects, people, even places, often get lost, or are
on the way to being lost, in Bishop9s work. One of her most famous poems,
<One Art,= is about the art of losing. Is this Bishop9s one art? The thing she
does best? Perhaps it is the rhetorical gesture, the poem, for which she is best
known. And yet, as contributors in this book point out, Bishop is also an
astonishing poet of touch and sensation, interested in the detailed, intimate
connections between people and in the ways in which people struggle to
connect as well. Her love poems, often written in the aftermath of an argu-
ment or separation, always cling to the possibility of forgiveness and recon-
ciliation. <Love should be put into action,= screams an old hermit in a very
early poem, even if it rarely is (P 10). <Insomnia,= one of a series of poems
from A Cold Spring on the false dream of a happy relationship, similarly
ends on the hope that <you love me= (P 68). This desperate poem, rejected
by The New Yorker for being <small= and <personal= (NYr 112), renects
in a cryptic form Bishop9s lifelong struggle to express lesbian desire poeti-
cally. Whereas the poems published in Bishop9s lifetime cage such desire,
many of the posthumous writings set it free. Bishop9s queer politics are a key
concern of at least a third of the essays in this volume. According to Susan
Rosenbaum (Chapter 4), Bishop naturalizes female and lesbian desire in a
manner comparable to other women artists interested in surrealism, such as
Leonor Fini and Lee Miller. Bonnie Costello, in a wide-ranging assessment
of Bishop9s engagement with the poetic tradition (Chapter 5), links many of

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the love poems to her close reading of orst Herbert and Hopkins, and later
Baudelaire. Bethany Hicok (Chapter 7) credits a change in Bishop9s lyric
voice to her specioc experience of living in Key West in the 1930s31940s,
while Barbara Page (Chapter 8) moves the story on to Brazil in the 1950s3
1960s, in particular Bishop9s love for Lota de Macedo Soares, arguably her
most signiocant romantic relationship.
Bishop9s cautious engagement with politics can be connected to her love
lyrics, as essays in this volume by Steven Axelrod (Chapter 2), Bethany
Hicok (Chapter 7), and Kirstin Hotelling Zona (Chapter 3), among others,
point out. From a personal position of privilege, she consistently attempted
to negotiate between rich and poor, master and servant, colonizer and col-
onized, while aware that the very position of being a negotiator was itself
compromising. This unease is foregrounded in Bishop9s Key West poems,
including <Jerónimo9s House,= <Cootchie,= <Songs for a Colored Singer,=
and particularly <Faustina, or Rock Roses.= To what extent are the awk-
ward encounters depicted in these poems deliberate? Did Bishop, as Renée
Curry suggests in her book White Women Writing White (2000), always fail
to see past her own origins as a white middle-class woman? Did she ever
poetically cross the color divide? Axelrod thinks not, or at least not until
the late poem, <In the Waiting Room=: <Perhaps this one moment repre-
sents the culmination of Bishop9s racial politics 3 the achievement of the
desired empathy that had so long eluded her= (quotation from Chapter 2).
Kirstin Hotelling Zona is equally cautious about crediting Bishop with too
much insight into the experiences of being an outsider in modern society.
Like Axelrod, she sees <In the Waiting Room= as the summation of Bishop9s
repeated attempts to face up to the <part she plays in constructing the oth-
er9s ideality or 8strangeness.9= Comparing the constantly shifting perspective
of the poem to a olm, she praises Bishop9s honesty in reminding us of <the
particular, and limited perspective 3 8Elizabeth9s9 3 through which we are
viewing her world= (quotation from Chapter 3).
Bishop is on safer ground when approaching a subject from the position of
being an outsider herself. This was clearly the case during her long residence
in Brazil. Her poems about the meaning and purpose of travel, in particular
the sequence of poems that opens Questions of Travel (<Arrival at Santos,=
<Brazil, January 1, 1502,= and <Questions of Travel=), are justly-celebrated
for their investigation of the relationship between home and elsewhere. In
<Manuelzinho,= adopting the voice of <a friend of the writer= (almost cer-
tainly Macedo Soares) allows her to translate class tension from Brazilian
into English. For Steven Axelrod, the poem ends up siding with <its sati-
rized title character,= the gardener of Macedo Soares and Bishop9s house at
Samambaia. Barbara Page agrees: <Manuelzinho deserves to inherit, if not

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the earth, certainly a good piece of it.= <The Riverman= is another Brazilian
poem that modioes Bishop9s perspective through a different voice; in this
case, Charles Wagley9s book, Amazon Town. In <Going to the Bakery= and
<Under the Window: Ouro Prêto,= she listens in on the conversations nearby.
Barbara Page9s essay on Bishop9s Brazilian writing demonstrates how <from
the buffering distance of South America, Bishop9s long mediation on home
and homelessness branched into new considerations of what it means to be
a lifelong traveler.=
As Bishop moved literally from north to south, crossing the equator, she
arguably became less cautious about taking a political stance in her poetry.
In the Key West poem, <Roosters,= for example, <unwanted love, conceit
and war= are as much a feature of the human world as the avian one,
but the poem lets the reader join the dots. If <Roosters= is a poem that
emphasizes <the essential baseness of militarism= (OA 96), as she asserts
in a famous 1940 letter to Marianne Moore, it does so obliquely. The
poems from Bishop9s second collection, A Cold Spring, are just as elusive.
According to Bethany Hicok, in poems such as <Over 2,000 Illustrations
and a Complete Concordance,= we ond Bishop <playing, Nabokov-like,
with the reader9s desire to ond meaning.= In <The Armadillo,= a Brazilian
poem from Questions of Travel, however, the speaker makes her feelings
about human carelessness, in this case toward the natural world, much
clearer. The illegal ore balloons cause devastation to the animals that live
downwind 3 from the owls that nee their burnt-out nests to a glisten-
ing armadillo that leaves the scene <head down, tail down= (P 102). The
poem9s onal image is a <baby rabbit= jumping out at the poet: <So soft! 3 a
handful of intangible ash / with oxed, ignited eyes= (P 102). Perhaps Bishop
reserves her most empathetic moments for animals? Do they do the work
of mediating between man and nature better than the poet? In addition
to Bishop9s much-anthologized poem, <The Fish,= we might add <At the
Fishhouses,= <In the Village,= <Sandpiper,= <The Hanging of the Mouse,=
<Crusoe in England,= <The Moose,= and <Pink Dog= to a list of memorable
animal writings, not to mention her fondness for hybrid creatures such as
<The Man-Moth= and <The Riverman.= Animal studies and eco-critical
approaches to Bishop9s poetry may, as Susan Rosenbaum observes, <re-
orient our understanding of modernist experiments by women poets and
artists in particular.= Like the moose9s sudden appearance at the end of the
eponymous poem, there is something both <homely= and <otherworldly=
about all of Bishop9s animal poems (P 193). Tempted to see likeness in the
activity of a sandpiper on the shoreline or the appearance of a dog in the
street, Bishop also reminds us that seeing likeness may, like many acts of
comparison, also be illusory.

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