Elizabeth Bishop’s Evolutionary Poetics

“Elizabeth Bishop’s Evolutionary Poetics” theorizes the queer Darwinian and biopolitical investment of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetics. There is a tendency in Bishop scholarship to read her as an apolitical poet. I challenge this reading by providing an exegesis of her early affiliations with John Dewey’s aesthetic-political philosophy and Darwinian evolution. I argue that Bishop’s poetics in the thirties—shaped by the radicalism of the decade—sought to furnish a political ideal out of the scientific materialism of Darwinism and the aesthetic philosophy of John Dewey. I trace her philosophical and political affiliations and use them as a mode of inquiry into how these figures helped her to articulate a queer posthuman politics.