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In a 1957 letter of apology written to Elizabeth Bishop for the hypomanic episode he’d recently suffered while the two visited together in Maine, Robert Lowell dramatizes his sense of regret and defeat on the drive home to Boston: As I dully drove back over the Bango[r] toll bridge in my gray and blue Ford, the nut still rattling in the hub cap as though we were dragging a battered tin can at our heels, I looked up and a sign said, “When money talks it says, ‘Chevrolet.’” (WIA 214) Lowell doesn’t elaborate on the anecdote, but given his choice to close the letter with it, we can assume he expected Bishop to feel its pathos: he illustrates with the Chevy ad’s acquisitive bravado not just personal abjection but a being out of joint with a U.S. cultural moment defined by crass, cocky Madison Avenue copy. Bishop seems to have registered the anecdote’s import. In response, she avoids explicit reference to any of Lowell’s overtly emotional confessions in his letter (including the confession of romantic feelings for her), opting instead to narrate her own automobile story. Like Lowell’s, it is filled with pathos: Driving with Brazilian friends (this was Bishop’s first trip back to the States since moving to Brazil in the early 1950s) from Manhattan to East Hampton later that same week, she reports: It poured and rained and the millions of automobiles on the endless highways whished-whished by, almost in silence. . . . There were super-highways and clover-leafs in 1951 [the year Bishop left the United States], but they have ex-foliated beyond my wildest dreams since then—they’re really terrifying. . . . I still can’t believe in any of it. . . . Every time I’ve made . . . a side-trip on this trip . . . I’ve come back depressed, I don’t know why—I think it’s mostly automobiles—and then I decide it’s just some lack of vitality in myself that makes me feel so hopeless about my own country. . . . and “Space” in Art Bishop’s Midcentury Critique of the United States Gillian White GILLIAN WHITE 256 But I really can’t bear much of American life these days—surely no country has ever been so filthy rich and so hideously uncomfortable at the same time. (WIA 228–29) This last assertion—“so filthy rich and so hideously uncomfortable”—is remarkably forceful rhetoric for Bishop, who tended to dislike hyperbole and cliché and, as Stephen Gould Axelrod notes, found it “difficult to broach political topics, even when writing to a rather political friend” (“Elizabeth” 844). And yet the statementisactuallycharacteristicofcritiquesof “Americanlife”Bishopmadeinletters to Lowell in the years surrounding her 1957 trip “home.” Her admission that she “can’t believe in any of it” suggests the power of a then ascendant way of life in the United States; Bishop can’t believe in cars the way a person might fail to believe in God (WIA 229). The recently published letters in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell make clearer than ever before Bishop’s intense queasiness over U.S. culture at midcentury—the encroaching “slickness” of mass media into the literary arts, and the excesses and reach of high capitalism. This essay will explore Bishop’s criticisms of the United States in her letters to Lowell with an eye to the important, subtle, and mostly inexplicit ways in which they inform her poetics of the era. Most importantly, the letters help show that Bishop’s well-knownconcernforapoetics of “modesty” (articulated to Lowell in a 1958 letter—onlyafewmonthsafterhervisitto theUnitedStates)canberegarded as a sharply political stance influenced by her midcentury cultural malaise (250). She diagnoses in a range of contemporary U.S. poetry (from “academic” poets to the Beats) a lack of “space” (250) and a glut of “self-consciousness” (335). Writing to Lowell in 1961 that a “real real protest” in contemporary poetry was needed, she exhibits concern that art should strive to create interpretive space by resisting and even protesting the rhetorical excesses of mass media shaping poetry’s sound and its range of concerns (364). In striving to realize this space as “protest” in her own midcentury work, Bishop explores the processes by which discursive language shapes and even contests the idea of “voice”—another sign of excess, Bishop thought. Realizing the extent of Bishop’s concern with what she regarded as social and cultural forms of immodesty in the United States...

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