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WhenElizabethBishopleft theUnitedStatesin1951andembarkedonherjourney in the hope of satisfying her “immodest demands for a different world,/and a better life, and complete comprehension/of both at last, and immediately” (PPL 71), she had been unhappy and ill at ease in conducting the business aspect of poetry, exemplified by her disastrous year as the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress. Writing to Lowell while on board the merchant ship Bowplate, Bishop remarks, “With me on the boat I brought your review of Randall [Jarrell’s The Seven League Crutches] and Randall’s review of you [The Mills of the Kavanaughs] & I’ve been brooding over them both” (WIA 130). Jarrell’s review points out the many flaws in Lowell’s long title poem, a poem about which Bishop also felt ambivalent , though she had offered extensive advice about it, much of which Lowell hadfollowed(WIA112–18).Lowell’sgenerallylaudatoryreviewsingledoutJarrell’s “The Night Before the Night Before Christmas” as “the best, most mannered, the mostunforgettable,andthemostirritatingpoeminthebook”(Collected Prose89), the very poem Bishop had characterized nearly two years earlier as “limp & more suited for a short story”: “When someone sends you something are you supposed to ‘criticize’ or merely appreciate?” she had asked Lowell (WIA 73). Right after she confesses to “brooding” over her friends’ reviews of each other, Bishop mentions writing “an I hope withering [review] of ‘The Riddle of Emily Dickinson’ for the New Republic.” Bishop’s review of this 1951 book by Rebecca Patterson is indeed withering; it condemns as reductive the book’s thesis (that all of Dickinson’s love poems were written for a woman, Kate Scott, with whom she had a yearlong relationship between 1859 and 1860). Bishop not only attacks Patterson ’sbook,butaskswhythewholegenreof “literarydetective-work. . .seem[s] finally just unpleasant.” “Perhaps it is because,” Bishop continues, “in order to reach a single reason for anything as singular and yet manifold as literary creation, it is Bishop, Lowell, and the Aesthetics of Autobiographical Poetry Richard Flynn WORDS IN AIR 205 necessary to limit the human personality’s capacity for growth and redirection to the point of mutilation” (“Unseemly” 20).1 Bishop’s discomfort with reviewing, however, by no means indicates that she was unconcerned with aesthetic matters; now that we have a fuller record of her previously unpublished notes and letters, it is clear that she generally conducted her most important critical investigations informally with trusted correspondents like Lowell, keeping those investigations well outside the public eye. Indeed, she mayhavefoundwritingbookreviewsdifficultpreciselybecausethegenredemands both adopting an authoritative tone and forgoing a certain amount of nuance in one’s response to the work, given journalistic constraints. “The analysis of poetry is growing more and more pretentious and deadly,” she wrote in her remarks for John Ciardi’s Mid-Century American Poetry (1950). “After a session with a few of the highbrow magazines one doesn’t want to look at a poem for weeks, much less start writing one” (PPL 687). Both Bishop and Lowell seem ambivalent at best about what Jarrell lampooned as “The Age of Criticism” (1952), but unlike their mutual friend, neither poet took to reviewing on a regular basis. Bishop at once admired and deplored Jarrell’s role as prominent critic, writing to Lowell to say, “[Jarrell’s] reviews infuriate me and yet that activity and that minute-to-minute devotion to criticism is really wonderful” (WIA 130). Forallof herhostilitytowhatshedeemedthedeadlypretentiousnessoftheage of criticism, as well as her seeming insecurity about her own critical faculties, Bishop ’s undergraduate essays, such as “Time’s Andromedas” (PPL 641–59), “Gerard Manley Hopkins: Notes on Timing in His Poetry” (PPL 660–67), and especially “Dimensions for a Novel” (PPL 671–80), had shown her early ability to grapple with difficult critical concepts and to engage in original analysis. Nevertheless, Bishop, to take her own adage in “Dimensions” to heart, wrote: “Bright ideas about how to do a thing are to be mistrusted, and the only bright idea which ever proves its worth is that of the thing itself” (671). Her tentative foray into reviewing during her year as poetry consultant proved unsatisfactory because she was disengaged from the poetry she reviewed. As Brett Millier points out, “Love from Emily,” Bishop ’sbriefreviewofanotherDickinsonbook,Emily Dickinson’s Letters to Doctor and Mrs. Josiah Gilbert Holland (PPL 689–91), “took her nearly a year to write” (225). In October 1958, however, Poetry magazine published a review by Bishop that is uncharacteristically lively and enthusiastic: “I Was But Just Awake,” a review of the revised edition of Walter de la Mare...

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