Something We Have That They Don't: British and American Poetic Relations since 1925

“A Whole Climate of Opinion”: Auden’s Influence on Bishop

“A Whole Climate of Opinion” Auden’s Influence on Bishop bonnie costello We tend to think about influence in terms of the family tree, but there is no deep tap-root uniting Elizabeth Bishop and W. H. Auden. Auden’s ties are to a civil tradition derived from Chaucer and Pope. Bishop’s line is meditative and descriptive, drawn from the metaphysicals, the romantics, and most immediately , from the symbolist element of modernism. Auden’s influence on her work,while pervasive,is more horizontal,something like an atmosphere or a climate : dispersed, changing, felt rather than perceived. Consequently, while Auden’simportancetoAmericanpoetssuchasRandallJarrell,JohnAshbery,and James Merrill has been widely acknowledged, his role in Bishop’s development has received little attention. But for Bishop, I want to argue, Auden provided a crucial counterpoint to the modernist poets whose legacy she had inherited.1 He helped her find ways to distinguish herself from her literary parentage, by offering an authoritative example of what contemporary poetry might look like. Bishop may be partially responsible for the gap in critical commentary on this influence. When Ashley Brown asked her about Auden, she remarked, “I bought all his books as they came out and read them a great deal. But he didn’t affect my poetic practice.”2 She turned the discussion toward Wallace Stevens, and a number of Bishop critics have followed that lead. But Bishop would not be the first poet to cover her tracks. To George Starbuck she was more forthcoming about Auden’s importance. When asked to recall, from her youth, “who, among the poets in the generation ahead of [her]” did she know she would have to “come to terms with,” her answer was Auden. “All through my college years, Auden was publishing his early books, and I and my friends, a few of us, were very much interested in him. His first books made a tremendous impression on me.”3 And in her contribution to the Harvard Advocate tribute to Auden a few years before, in 1974, she had written: All through the thirties and forties,I and all my friends who were interested in poetry, read him constantly. We hurried to see his latest poem or book, and either wrote as much like him as possible, or tried hard not to. His then leftist politics, his ominous landscapes, his intimations of betrayed loves, war on its way, disasters and death, matched exactly the mood of our latedepression and post-depression youth. We admired his apparent toughness , his sexual courage — actually more honest than Ginsberg’s say, is now, while still giving expression to technically dazzling poetry. Even the most hermetic early poems gave us the feeling that here was someone who knew — about psychology, geology, birds, love, the evils of capitalism — what have you? They colored our air and made us feel tough, ready, and in the know, too.4 Bishop seems to have had difficulty analyzing Auden’s impact. In general, after a few precocious college pieces, she abandoned critical writing. Her Advocate essay reverts, after a few remarks, to a page and a half of quotations, concluding : “These verses and many, many more of Auden’s, have been part of my mind for years — I could say, part of my life” (HA 47). Those verses worked their way into Bishop’s poetry as well, not only in timely themes, but also in form and idiom. Her imagination is more skeptical, more observational, less didactic and epigrammatic thanAuden’s.Her impersonal mode is more drawn to external particulars than to general truths of human nature. So his influence is oblique. But we can recognize it nevertheless, diffused through the texture of her work. Bishop was publicly reticent concerning Auden, but the evidence of her enthusiasm is readily available in her archive from the 1930s.Her slim KeyWest Notebook (1937–38) contains at least five references to Auden, and on February 25,1937, she writes to Marianne Moore that she is working on a review (“my first”) about Auden’s Look Stranger! (which appeared in the United States as On This Island). Brett Millier’s biography of Bishop thought the piece lost, but an incomplete draft, entitled “Mechanics of Pretense,” has since been located in the Vassar Special Collections.5 As with the Advocate piece, the essay lapses into quotation after only a few paragraphs. Yet one point from the unfinished essay is clear: Auden created a language appropriate to the world in which Bishop lived. Marianne Moore provided...