Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century: Reading the New Editions

Alice in Wonderland: The Authoring and Editing of Elizabeth Bishop’s Uncollected Poems

Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, edited by Alice Quinn, was marketed as a new book of poems by Elizabeth Bishop, or at least as a new book of “Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments.” The book’s subtitle was the first thing to attract Helen Vendler’s scorn in her infamous New Republic review of the book: “This book should not have been issued with its present subtitle of ‘Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments.’ It should have been called ‘Repudiated Poems.’. . . Students eagerly wanting to buy ‘the new book by Elizabeth Bishop’ should be told to go back and buy the old one, where the poet represents herself as she wished to be known. The eighty-odd poems that this famous perfectionist allowed to be printed over the years are ‘Elizabeth Bishop’ as a poet. This book is not” (33). Before assessing the merits of Vendler’s criticisms of Edgar Allan Poe, it is worth rememberingthatBishopcouldbeguiltyofmisleadingtitlestoo.Her1969volume The Complete Poems, for example, was anything but “complete” since it left out all kinds of poems later to find a home in the “Uncollected” and “Poems Written in Youth” sections of the 1983 Complete Poems: 1927–1979.1 As Charles Berger points out: “Now that we can easily see the other choices she might have made, as opposed to the comparatively lackluster poems that she included to round out the [1969] volume, it becomes all the more interesting to think about what message she intended to send about the shape of her oeuvre and her career. Was she saving better drafts for a later volume?” (4). Bishop was always about to complete a new poem or story. One of the unfinished poems in Edgar Allan Poe is actually titled “Something I’d Meant to Write About for 30 Years.” In 1957, for example, she told Robert Lowell about a poem she was working on called “Letter to Two Friends”: “It began on a rainy day and since it has done nothing but rain since we’ve been back I took it up again and this time shall try to get it done. It is rather light, though. Oh heavens, when does one begin to write the real poems?” (OA 348). At the point of writing this letter, Alice in Wonderland The Authoring and Editing of Elizabeth Bishop’s Uncollected Poems Jonathan Ellis JONATHAN ELLIS 12 Bishop had published two collections of poetry, the second of which had won the Pulitzer Prize. Yet even with this much “real” writing complete, she was still unsure whether she was a poet. Here is the opening section of “Letter to Two Friends”: Heavens! It’s raining again and the “view” is now two weeks overdue and the road is impassable and after shaking all four paws the cat retires in disgust to the highest closet shelf, and the dogs smell awfully like dogs, and I’m slightly sick of myself, and sometime during the night the poem I was trying to write has turned into prepositions: ins and aboves and upons [overs and unders and ups]— what am I trying to do? Change places in a canoe? method of composition— (EAP 113) The poem is remarkably similar to the letter, from the general complaints about rainandwritingtoherexclamationtothe“Heavens!,”“LettertoTwoFriends,”like Sylvia Plath’s 1958 poem “Poems, Potatoes,” is a great poem about not being able to write poetry. In Plath’s case, the problem is caused by a gap between the imagined poem, which is “knobbly” and real, and the finished poem, in which words muzzle and murder the original idea (CP 106). Bishop’s dilemma is both less philosophical —she always knows that poems are part unreal—and more practical. The poem she is “trying to write/has turned into prepositions:/ins and aboves and upons.” It reads more like a letter. Reading Edgar Allan Poe, not just alongside The Complete Poems but also alongside One Art: Letters and Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, reveals how closely Bishop composed letters and poems and perhaps also how this closeness could sometimes mar her poetic gifts. The second stanza depicts the activity of changing genres (and perhaps changing her “method of composition”) as akin to switching “places in a canoe.” There is a lovely unwritten pun here that Bishop surely implies ALICE IN WONDERLAND 13 even if she never writes it down. If you attempt to change places in a...