Elizabeth Bishop is the exemplary poet of the twentieth century in many ways. There are so many pitfalls to avoid in the writing of poetry, from sentimentality to excess seriousness, lack of irony and decorous language, the sort of things that many assume to be 'poetry' but soon look incongruous once their moment has passed. Being able to divest writing of all such indulgences- and I'd say Larkin and Thom Gunn are similarly good at it- is where 'good poetry' begins and there's less of it than one might imagine.
Ms. Bishop was also very wary of such overrated terms as 'creativity', the process of 'creative writing', the 'confessional' style of her associate Robert Lowell, the term 'gay' and was accomplished enough as a poet per se not to require the special pleading of specifically 'feminist' agendas as perhaps Adrieene Rich was prone to. Not only that but she is surely to be admired for the number of occasions on which she was hospitalized after prodigious drinking binges, committed herself to passionate if flawed relationships and is quoted as saying,
'I've always felt that I've written poetry more by not writing it than writing it'.
With her Collected output consisting of only about 100 poems, we could interpret that to mean both that she only completed poems that she as entirely happy with and that her method was to pare down her lines to those essentials that allowed in no superfluous baggage. It works and her example is likely to continue to serve the generations that came after her very well and contribute to a reputation that will see her regarded ahead of her contemporaries in both American and British poetry.
Megan Marshall's biography sets out her story in chapters that take their titles from the six end words used in the sestina, A Miracle for Breakfast, and those chapters are punctuated by her own memoir having been a student of Bishop's at Harvard. There is an obvious danger that such an approach might make it more of a personal account by Marshall but those chapters are brief, Megan is a Pulitzer Prize winner in her own right and they genuinely and unobtrusively inform and augment the book with a thread that runs through to the end. It is possible that Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell and Adrienne Rich are sometimes less than charitably presented but if Bishop is the reason why one would come to the book in the first place, she is equally credited with all her failings, too, and if she is more sympathetically treated that might be because she is the greater poet and nobody ever should have thought that such a disciplined literary achievement was going to be easy.
If, as it is possible to conclude, she found herself rootless, capable of profound happiness and subject to overwhelming difficulties and uncertainties, perhaps those are corollaries that fed her art. She would begin teaching creative writing by saying, 'I don't believe poetry can be taught' and that contradiction, whether it is true or not, does her great credit.
This is an immensely valuable and highly readable assessment of a poet that produced one of the most exquisite and sparely-made bodies of work in the language in the twentieth century in which the vulnerable yet adventurous artist succeeds in what she cared most about and Megan Marshall has done her a great service in giving us this well-organized biography. It can only send us back to the poems with renewed interest and that is all one would want it to do.
