according to their lights

“Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! / And I let the fish go.” Two free associations here. The first: a friend of Elizabeth’s gave the book in which this poem appeared to her husband, himself something of a fisherman. He singled out “The Fish” for special praise, saying “I wish I knew as much about it as she does.” Four years later this man published a novella, a fishing story some of us will remember as ending quite differently from the poem. He called it The Old Man and the Sea. Now what are the facts behind such fictions? It would surprise nobody to learn that, in his long career as a sportsman, Ernest Hemingway let go far more fish than Elizabeth Bishop ever hooked. Besides, her fish wasn’t let go at all, not in real life; she told in an interview about bringing it proudly back to the dock—intact. But both she and Hemingway, whatever their private strengths and weaknesses, were concerned in their work with attitudes, “emblems of conduct”—or shall we say, some form of moral headgear—for the reader who wanders out unprotected into the elements Thus, both fish are invested with grandeur and wisdom, and the respective fishermen behave nobly, even reverently, according to their lights. That remark about her poem, Elizabeth told the interviewer, “meant more to me than any praise in the quarterlies. I knew that underneath Mr. H. and I were really a lot alike.”

—James Merrill, “A Class Day Talk,” Recitative (Northpoint Press, 1986)

accuracy, spontaneity, mystery

Accuracy is the essence in any consideration of Bishop’s poetry. Those of her poems which fail…do so more often than not because they’re imprecise in matters of tone and feeling. The Library of America volume includes an untitled and fragmentary essay on poetry, tentatively dated to ‘the late 1950s - early 1960s,’ in which Bishop states that the three qualities she prizes most in poetry are ‘Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery’ (the italics are hers). To illustrate these qualities, she gives examples from George Herbert, Hopkins and Baudelaire, as well as from Auden, Lowell, Moore and Dylan Thomas. She might have included much of her own work; accuracy, spontaneity and mystery are perhaps its most distinctive traits, and in spontaneity – or rather, the illusion of spontaneity – she seems to surpass most of those she cites. Spontaneity is, of course, the slipperiest of the three. None of the poets she singles out in the essay is ‘spontaneous’, in any usual sense, nor was Bishop herself. It was the effect of spontaneity she admired…

—Eric Ormsby, “Ancient Chills,” Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place (The Porcupine Quill, 2011)

perfectly useless concentration

What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

[Letter from Elizabeth Bishop to Anne Stevenson]

One Art: Letters by Elizabeth Bishop, selected and edited by Robert Giroux (FSG, 1995)

coming home

“But it took him a long time / finally to make up his mind to go home.” That’s the last line and a half of Bishop’s “The Prodigal.” Home, of course, is mutable, like any word or concept. But not indefinitely so. We learn from poetry of the gradual balancing of language on the exact midpoint between it-could-be-anything and it-can-only-be-this. I want to ask in this essay if I’m a poet, if that’s my “home”—but I think, for me, it’s still too early to know.

—Valerie Cornell, “On Being Unable to Read,” By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2000), edited by Molly McQuade.

accurate and modest

Elizabeth Bishop is spectacular in being unspectacular. Why has no one ever thought of this, one asks oneself; why not be accurate and modest.

—Marianne Moore, in a review of Bishop's North & South (Houghton Mifflin, 1946), The Nation (Sept. 29, 1946).

taste and timelessness

How shifty a thing taste can be, how shitty, even one’s own. I tremble to remember the poets, like Elizabeth Bishop, I dismissed out of hand, whose greatness dawned on me only later. Then there are poets I once admired and who opened ways through thickets for me, but whose work now I find clumsy and shiftless. I think we all tend to believe we can see through the vagaries of our moment to some absolute standard of judgment—this must be a characteristic of human consciousness itself—but the conviction is absurd. So, I never blab anymore about poets whose work doesn’t or no longer moves me. But there are, however and thank goodness, poets the power and force of whose work once nearly knocked me down with delight and envy, and still does, so that when I read them again I feel again like an apprentice.

—C. K. Williams, “On Being Old,” In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest (U. of Chicago Press, 2012)

image of note

When all the gulls flew up at once, they sounded
like a big tree in a strong wind, its leaves.
I’d shut my eyes and think about a tree,
an oak, say, with real shade, somewhere.

—Elizabeth Bishop, “Crusoe in England”

[I admire the way Bishop has deftly connected auditory and visual elements in this image.]