Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language

2. Elizabeth Bishop’s Strange Reality

Chapter 2 ELIZABETH BISHOP’S STRANGE REALITY sS Insofar as environmentally inclined poetry is based in fidelity to a real nat­ ural world, any ecocritical account of Elizabeth Bishop must surely start with her “famous eye”—her extremely close attention to the visual details of the natural world. This familiar characterization of Bishop alone makes her an obvious choice for a study in ecopoetics. Unlike Wallace Stevens, for whom reality is most often figured abstractly and obliquely, Bishop depicts nature as palpably particular and “real”; she mistrusted extreme aestheticism that would raise art above nature: “I remember in the 5th or 6th grade, in précis writing, the teacher confounded me by saying that there actually were people to whom a description ‘of a forest’ meant more than the ‘forest’ itself” (qtd. in Keller 412). For Bishop, the power of poetry’s artifice takes as read a world that pre­ cedes and exceeds language, even if our experience of that world is inevitably mediated, and one way she respects nature’s reality is through close obser­ vation. Indeed, a few early reviewers complained that her poems were too often “mere description.” Others have recognized more in Bishop’s poems than outer landscapes. They note the influence on her of surrealism and the way so many of her poems, even those that appear to look outward at the world, reveal the psychological concerns of her “inner landscapes.” Her work also draws attention to the surface of the poem and thematizes artifice itself. Furthermore, most critics see in Bishop’s poems her devotion to form and careful craft, even in the freest of her free verse. Despite the relatively more 56 Elizabeth Bishop’s Stange Reality S 57 personal themes and tone of her later work (most famously “In the Waiting Room,” in which the speaker comes to realize that she is “Elizabeth”) com­ pared to her earlier work, Bishop never presumed to “break through” form to achieve immediacy and authenticity the way so many of her contemporaries did. Bishop’s (albeit idiosyncratic) formalism, as well as her most frequently noted personal qualities—modesty and restraint—may partly explain why, like Richard Wilbur, Bishop does not frequently come up in discussions of nature writing or “ecocentric” texts (except perhaps fleetingly in reference to the speaker who “let go” of her famous fish, a textbook ecocentric moment). Indeed, like Wilbur, who uses the image of a rain dancer to describe the paradoxical “necessity of artifice” in evoking reality (as I discuss in chapter 3), Bishop looks to deliberately nonrealistic indigenous artwork as a useful alternative to referential, merely “descriptive” art that attempts to hide its own artifice: “I do not understand the nature of the satisfaction a completely accurate description or imitation of anything at all can give, but apparently in order to produce it the description or imitation must be brief, or compact, and have at least the effect of being spontaneous . . . Long, fine, thorough passages of descriptive prose fail to produce it, but sometimes animal or bird masks at the Museum of Natural History give one (as the dances that once went with them might have been able to do) . . . [an] immediacy of identifi­ cation” (“As We Like It” 130–31). Any “immediacy of identification” with the natural world, according to Bishop, does not attempt to discard the various “masks” and “dances” of artifice; rather, immediacy relies on artifice. Because American nature writing is traditionally (since Emerson’s “meter­making” argument) associated with the purported immediacy and “naturalness” of organic form, and because organic form in its usual sense so often necessitates the Romantic egoism of its speaker, Bishop’s imperson­ alism and formalism remove her from the conventional category of environ­ mental literature despite her acute powers of description.1 But if we view artifice as paradoxically the most natural way through which humans relate to the rest of nature (and notice the fallacies in the usual arguments concerning the supposedly special proximity of free verse to nature), then the ecocritical importance of Bishop’s poetry becomes clear. Furthermore, as some critics have rightly concluded, Bishop’s poetry is nei­ ther mere description nor pure rhetoric in disguise. Like Stevens, Plath, and Wilbur, she inhabits the complex middle ground between concept and per­ cept. She expresses what Stevens calls “something subtler” than the domi­ nance of either reality or the imagination, instead striking, in Wilbur’s terms, [3.144.189...