A Poet’s High Argument: Elizabeth Bishop and Christianity by Laurel Snow Corelle (review)

348 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE unleashed by the horsemen of the Apocalypse. Charlotte Bronte also invokes the Apocalypse to relate political conflict in spiritual causes. In Shirley, the character Castlereah is compared to the antichrist and his pro-war allies to the satanic legions unleashed before the final battle ofArmageddon. Overall, then, Kevin Mills does a remarkable job of making connections to the important concept of Apocalyptic literature in the Victorian Age. If one is unfamiliar with the era and its remarkable writers, the tour might become a bit challenging, but overall, the study is done with verve and insight and leaves a lasting impression. Darlene E. Erickson Ohio Dominican University A Poet's High Argument: Elizabeth Bishop and Christianity. By Laurel Snow Corelle. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. ISBN 978-1-57003762 -7. Pp. 152. $34.95. Few agnostic poets have received as much attention for their engagement with Christianity as has Elizabeth Bishop in the past two decades. Cheryl Walker's God and Elizabeth Bishop: Meditations on Religion and Poetry (2005) analyzed Bishop's spiritual themes and placed her in conversation with a number ofChristian writers, both past and contemporary. Readers approaching Laurel Snow Corelle's similarly themed A Poet's High Argument may ask-with justification-if another book on Elizabeth Bishop and Christianity is really needed. The answer is both yes and no. Walker's God and Elizabeth Bishop, while an engaging read, proves somewhat frustrating for scholars in its lack of footnotes or endnotes. Corelleremediesthislack, providing an ample seventeenpages ofendnotes after the 109 pages of the book's body. As Corelle explains in her introduction, her purpose is to balance Walker's perspective-which sometimes has the effect of making Bishop out to be more consistently friendly to Christian tradition than she, in fact, was-by devoting significant attention to Bishop's critique of Christianity. However, the list of poems discussed in A Poet's High Argument is very similar to the list discussed by Walker, making Corelles arguments resemble an extended footnote, albeit a more nuanced footnote, to Walker's work. Corelle also draws upon Ieredith Merrins An Enabling Humility: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Uses of Tradition (1990) but is less explicitly feminist in her approach. Corelles critical method largely eschews the attention placed by other studies on Bishop's sexuality, preferring instead to document her "often discounted political sensibility" (15). Corelles first chapter, "God's Spreading Fingerprint;' explores Bishop's engagement with the Bible, especially in her poems "Roosters" and "Over 2,000 BOOK REVIEWS 349 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance:' Corelle claims that "Christian iconography pervades Bishop's work to a remarkable degree" but also that the subtlety of her scriptural references has led to their being overlooked by scholars (19). "Roosters;' Corelle explains, is "the only poem in her entire oeuvre in which she quotes the Bibledirectly" (19). In the poem, Corelle argues, Bishop critiques the church's reassigning of meaning to the symbol of the cock, or rooster. "An ancient symbol of militaristic and sexual aggression;' the cock has been re-written by the Church, with reference to the cock crowing after Peter's denial of Iesus, as "an icon of remorse and forgiveness" (20). The rooster in the poem also "signifies the fall of the [Catholic] Church into the temptations of material wealth" (23). Corelle produces quotations from Bishop'sreading material during the 1940s (about which she corresponded with Marianne Moore)-Reinhold Niebuhr's Beyond Tragedy,C. K. Ogden and 1.A. Richards's The Meaning ofMeaning, and Christopher Caudwell's Illusion and Reality-to suggest that Bishop might have found similar critique of the hierarchy and mystic ritualism of Catholicism in these sources. While "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance" does not directly quote the Bible, it is invoked by the title and the images within the poem. Corelle reads the poem as exploring links between Christianity and oppression, both the tyranny of the prejudiced reader's "weighted" eye and the historical "religious or racial tyranny" seen during the speaker's travels recounted in the second stanza (31). The poem returns to a biblical image in the final stanza, alluding to the Nativity...