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Elizabeth Bishop has emerged as one of the most important and widely discussed American poets of the twentieth century. However, Bishop published comparatively little in her lifetime, and our image of her as a writer and as a person has undergone a sea change over the past several years due to the publication of three major new editions of her work. The first of these editions, appearing in 2006, was Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, edited by Alice Quinn, a book that generated no little excitement and controversy through its publication of almost one hundred Bishop poems that had remained in manuscript at her death. This was followed in the spring of 2008 by the Library of America’s Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters, edited by Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz. This extensive volume made available hundreds of pages of previously unpublished or long out-of-print writings by Bishop, including poems, letters,stories,bookreviews,criticalessays,juvenilia,andevenbook-jacketblurbs. A few months later, in the fall of 2008, came Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton. This collection, which includes almost nine hundred pages of intimate and revealing letters between two major American poets, suggested insights into many aspects of Bishop’s life and world. These new editions, arriving in such quick succession, have expanded Bishop’s published oeuvre by more than one thousand pages and have placed before the reading public a “new” Elizabeth Bishop whose complex dimensions were previously familiar only to a small circle of scholars and devoted readers. In February 2011, in time for the centennial of Bishop’s birth, three further editions of Bishop’s writing appeared from Farrar, Straus and Giroux: the succinctly titled pairing Poems and Prose (the latter edited by Lloyd Schwartz), and Elizabeth Bishop and the “New Yorker,” edited by Joelle Biele. These volumes demonstrated yet again the continuing interest in Bishop’s steadily expanding body of published work. Introduction Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicok, and Thomas Travisano ANGUS CLEGHORN, BETHANY HICOK, AND THOMAS TRAVISANO 2 When Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box was first published in 2006, some readers and scholars, most notably Helen Vendler in an often-cited review in the New Republic, questioned the ethics of bringing into print the unpublished poetry of a deceased author. While, for some, a greatly enlarged understanding of the poet, of her work, and of her world is sufficient justification for this posthumous publication , others may prefer to defer to Elizabeth Bishop’s perceived intentions, believing that her fastidious approach to editing her poems would be reason enough to keep the “discards” boxed up. This book’s essays demonstrate that many forces were at work that may have blocked or hindered the completion or publication of various Bishop poems: issues that might be textual, sexual, psychological, cultural, political, or social. The status of “a minor female Wordsworth” (WIA 122)—her own self-description to Robert Lowell—would be an easier reputation for Bishop to live with than would be, for example, that of a revolutionary lesbian poet. However, new information has materialized from Bishop’s will indicating that she entrusted to others key decisions about the handling of her posthumous material. In his essay, Lloyd Schwartz notes that in her will Bishop gives her literary executors (her partner Alice Methfessel and the poet Frank Bidart)the “power 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.” By extension, one could argue that the whole “Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon,” including the three volumes discussed here, is enabled by this provision of her will. In fact, the will’s terms suggest that Bishop was by no means unwilling to have her unpublished papers see print and in fact seems to have anticipated that publication. Perhaps readers who hold dear the traditional image of the author with a small, select,andcarefullychosenoeuvre,andwhorejecttheemergentposthumousone, may concede that in so constructing her will, Bishop might have been “the author, in a sense, of her own undoing,” as Christina Pugh hints in this volume’s concluding essay. In any case, the consistent support by executors Methfessel and Bidart for publishing Bishop’s posthumous materials in essays, books, and periodicals in the decades leading up to the publication of Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, was sanctioned (and perhaps encouraged) by the author, who...

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