Poetry: The 1940s to the Present

With each passing year I yearn more avidly for the day when this chapter will undergo mitosis and become two, perhaps "Poetry: The 1940s to 1980" and "Poetry: Since the 1980s." I might then give more balanced coverage to a relentlessly expanding period that now spans seven decades and will soon add an eighth. Wherever this chapter might end, it always begins with Elizabeth Bishop, and this year it took me awhile to get beyond her. I highlight a landmark edition of her Poems, Prose, and Letters, and, after Robert Lowell receives separate attention, another splendid edition, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Bishop also figures as one poet among others in books by Bethany Hicok, Bonnie Costello, and Marit J. MacArthur. Bishop's and Lowell's middle-generation contemporary John Berryman has gotten short shrift since I took over writing this chapter in 2003, but this year I include After Thirty Falls: New Essays on John Berryman and Samuel Fisher Dodson's Berryman's Henry plus two articles. Lorine Niedecker also gets more limelight than usual, thanks to Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place. Evans Lansing Smith's James Merrill: Postmodern Magus and an article guarantee Merrill's customary spot, but some poets regularly featured are not represented, and only one "since 1980" experimental poet, Harryette Mullen, secured a place. In the immortal words of Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes. Who knows, maybe next year there will be nothing on either Bishop or Lowell.

i Elizabeth Bishop

In 1969, ten years before Elizabeth Bishop's death, Farrar, Straus and Giroux issued The Complete Poems, as if nothing more could be expected of her. Their publication of her Geography III in 1976 made a new edition of the "complete" poems necessary, but they did not release The Complete Poems 1927–1979 until 1983. This new "complete poems" staked a claim to "completeness" by including a miscellany of poems grouped under "Uncollected Work [1969]," "New Poems [1979]," "Uncollected Poems," "Poems Written in Youth," and "Translations." Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, ed. Alice Quinn (2006), put paid to the notion that the 1983 Complete Poems was complete (see AmLS 2006, pp. 391–92). Admittedly, some of the poems in Quinn's edition had already made their way into critical studies written by scholars who like Quinn had pored over manuscripts at Vassar or had made finds elsewhere. The edition did attract some criticism, most notably from Helen Vendler, who argued that its subtitle ought to have been "Repudiated Poems" since Bishop never intended that the poems in it would be published and she would have been appalled by their release.

To what extent a new Complete Poems will incorporate previously unpublished work, or unpublished until Quinn's edition came along, remains to be seen. In the meantime, Bishop's Poems, Prose, and Letters, ed. Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz (Library of America), goes a long way, one might argue a sufficiently long way, to giving us the sort of edition that we need. At 979 pages it is as substantial a volume as one might want, and the inclusion of published and unpublished prose texts and 53 letters, many not in One Art: Letters (1994) and in contrast to One Art all unabridged, adds to the volume's attractions. This edition provides, for example, the entire "Darwin" letter to Anne Stevenson, in which Bishop gives the most telling account of her poetics, but my favorite letter is one to Robert Boyers, written to him in 1973 in his capacity as editor of Salmagundi, which had published an article on Bishop's work by Jan B. Gordon. Bishop's letter is a wonderful example of that minor genre, an author's point-by-point corrective reply to a negative critical assessment brimming with factual mistakes.

Poems, Prose, and Letters prints Bishop's four collections, North & South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel, and Geography III, in their original order and state, plus all other poems from The Complete Poems 1927–1979 and, sometimes in different versions...