Poetry as Gift

The idea of poetry as a gift is as ancient as poetry itself. For Greek and related cultures, poets supplicated muses for the gift of inspiration and paid tribute to them in their poems. As Lewis Hyde has pointed out in The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, this reciprocal gift-giving resembles what occurred in the rituals of Greek mystery cults, as well as the Christian ritual of the Eucharist. The word Eucharist, in fact, derives from Greek roots referring to gift-giving: eu + kharistia can be translated as “giving blessed gifts” or “thanks-giving.” According to Hyde, the gifted poet, like a priest, uplifts audiences by facilitating their communion with the mystery of the poet’s creation, or Creation itself. “The primary commerce of art is a gift exchange,” Hyde argues, drawing a distinction between buying a commodity like a hacksaw at a hardware store and receiving the “gift” or “spirit” of a sublime poem. “Works of art exist simultaneously in two ‘economies,’ a market economy and a gift economy,” he reminds us. “Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art.” Surviving without a commercial market may be possible for a gifted poem; but, as Ezra Pound and many other poets have lamented over the centuries, it may be excruciating for the poet.

In a poem simply called “Poem,” written near the end of her life, Elizabeth Bishop reflects with matter-of-fact stoicism and quiet humor on the fate of poetry—and, indeed, all art—in a commercial culture that tends to value commodities over art. Musing on the origins of her gifts as a painter and poet, she begins her pictura poesis by comparing her poem to two artifacts: “an old-style dollar bill, / American or Canadian” and a “little painting” by her great uncle, the Canadian artist George Hutchinson. The painting depicts Great Village, Nova Scotia, where Bishop as a young girl lived with her maternal grandparents after her father died and her mother had a series of mental breakdowns. In the italicized section of the poem, which follows a description of the beautiful and sometimes ugly aspects of Great Village, Bishop recounts how her aunt gave her the painting as a gift, saying: “Would you like this? I’ll probably never / have room to hang these things again. / Your Uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George, / he’d be your great-uncle, left them all with Mother.” Bishop stresses genealogical confusion to highlight the complex family origins of her gifts and the way her artistic values differ from the values of the commercial culture she associates with her father, a businessman who ran a lucrative construction company in Boston. No one who bothers to look at the painting, except Bishop, finds any value in it, which is why she ruefully remarks: “This little painting has never earned any money in its life. / Useless and free, it has spent seventy years / as a minor family relic / handed along collaterally to owners / who looked at it sometimes, or didn’t bother to.” In terms of earning financial “collateral,” Bishop implies with a pun, the painting has been a failure.

Bishop’s “Poem” redeems—in the sense of giving new value to—this supposedly worthless painting by showing how it is a precious “relic” whose spiritual value far surpasses its commercial value. For Bishop the painting is not a commodity but a religious icon binding her back—as the Latin root of religion (re-ligare) implies—to a sacred site. The “useless” painting reconnects her to the origins of her poetic gift—her mother, her mother’s artistic uncle, her maternal grandparents’ farm in Great Village, and those years of relative happiness on the farm between 1915 and 1917 before she was “kidnapped” (as she puts it) by her father’s wealthy parents and transplanted to Massachusetts, where she suffered from depression and other ailments.

The meditation on financial values and artistic gifts that ends the poem arises from the question: “Are there any free gifts?” Most...