Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature

“The Iceberg Rises and Sinks Again” : Elizabeth Bishop’s Pneumopathologic Imagination

”The Iceberg Rises and Sinks Again” Elizabeth Bishop’s Pneumopathologic Imagination R David Palmieri In “The Imaginary Iceberg,” from her first book, North & South (1946), Elizabeth Bishop argues, “We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship, although it meant the end of travel.” English American poet Anne Robinson calls “The Imaginary Iceberg” and the poem that precedes it, “The Map,” texts that have as their subject “the nature of imagination.”1 In North & South and in all future volumes of collected poems that she published during her life, Bishop placed “The Map” and “The Imaginary Iceberg” in first and second position. As well as acting as a preface to her published work, these two poems can also be seen as an introduction to her experience of the imagination. Bishop’s imagination was cold, an iceberg afloat in an unstable and hard universe, or, as she phrases it, in seas of “moving marble.” The poet struggled to find a home at several coordinates on her interior map of the universe, but the ship containing the other faculties of her consciousness— will, reason, emotion— . . . steers off where waves give into one another’s waves and clouds run in a warmer sky. Icebergs behoove the soul (both being self-made from elements least visible) to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.2 Nathaniel Hawthorne, in a letter to his wife, counseled her to “keep the imagination sane,—that is one of the truest conditions of communion  10 David Palmieri with heaven.”3 Committed artist, closeted lesbian, and discreet alcoholic, Elizabeth Bishop learned throughout her life that the sanity of the poetic imagination comes at a price. The author of North & South was at a particular disadvantage and paid an unusually high price for her sanity because her “self-made” imagination never mapped the “waters” of her personal universe in a coherent fashion. On the contrary, Bishop imagined a disordered , impenetrable universe, and as a result her consciousness was, to use Eric Voegelin’s term, pneumopathologic, spiritually alienated. Bishop’s alienation speaks to many at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In 1995 Thomas Travisano described “The Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon ” in an article of that title in New Literary History, and Publisher’s Weekly noted in 2007 that in the almost three decades since her death in 1979, Bishop had “become one of America’s most popular 20th-century poets.”4 Bishop died of a cerebral aneurysm in Boston on October 6, 1979. Since then dozens of scholars have scoured the archives of the poet’s papers at Vassar College, her alma mater, in Poughkeepsie, New York. Bishop’s letters, journals, and uncollected poems and drafts are slowly being edited, and critical editions with full scholarly apparatus are inevitable .5 Many monographs about Bishop have been written not only in the United States but also in Canada, where she was raised between the ages of four and six, in Brazil, where she lived on and off for twenty-two years, and in England, where she has numerous admirers.6 The following Voegelinian contribution to the critical literature argues that Bishop’s posthumous popularity stems in part from her obsessive effort to reformulate Christian symbols of transcendence from which she had become alienated and that for many like her have lost their form and power. The beauty of Bishop’s poems results partially from her compositional practice. In the sonnet “Elizabeth Bishop 4,” Robert Lowell asked his friend: Do you still hang your words in air, ten years unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps or empties for the unimaginable phrase—7 It was a joke with Lowell and others close to her that Bishop would spend decades working on a poem, waiting patiently for her muse to call. Bishop adopted this practice in an effort to infuse a density of meaning into each of her poetic lines. Why was the task so time-consuming? As Bishop knew, her poems describe reality without a “philosophical adhesive,” in particular without the biblical cement that held together the imagination of the two English poets that she had admired in her youth, George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Richard Wilbur described a 11 Elizabeth Bishop’s Pneumopathologic Imagination conversation with Bishop near the end of her life in which she addressed her dilemma: Then Elizabeth began mentioning points of Christian doctrine that she thought it intolerable to believe. She said, “No, no, no. You must...