Elizabeth Bishop and Poetry of
the 1950s
UNDERSTANDING POETRY: AN ANTHOLOGY FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS
by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren
New York: Henry Holt and Company (revised edition, 1950; original edition, 1938)
from the prefatory “Letter to the Teacher” (1938):
This book has been conceived on the assumption that if poetry is worth teaching at all it is worth
teaching as poetry. The temptation to make a substitute for the poem as the object of study is
usually overpowering. The substitutes are various, but the most common ones are:
1. Paraphrase of logical and narrative content;
2. Study of biographical and historical materials;
3. Inspirational and didactic interpretation.
Of course, paraphrase may be necessary as a preliminary step in the reading of a poem, and a
study of the biographical and historical background may do much to clarify interpretation; but
these things should be considered as means and not as ends. And though one may consider a
poem as an instance of historical or ethical documentation, the poem in itself, if literature is to be
studied as literature, remains finally the object for study. Moreover, even if the interest is in the
poem as a historical or ethical document, there is a prior consideration: one must grasp the poem
as a literary construct before it can offer any real illumination as a document.
The unsolved contradictions of reality return
in artworks as immanent problems of form.
(Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory)
The four cardinal points
are three –
South and North
Vicente Huidobro
(Chile, 1893-1948)
What is a Map?
A picture of the whole, or a part, of the Earth’s surface.
What are the directions on a Map?
Toward the top, North; toward the bottom, South; to the right, East;
to the left, West.
In what direction from the center of the picture is the Island?
North.
In what direction is the Volcano? The Cape? The Bay? The Lake? The
Strait? The Mountains? The Isthmus? What is in the East? In the
West? In the South? In the North? In the Northwest? In the
Southeast? In the Northeast? In the Southwest?
(epigraph to Bishop’s last book, Geography III, 1976)
‘Naïve’ queries that become threatening ones
‘facts’ leading to (global) panic
Bishop’s themes – questions of direction,
location, identity (animal as well as human),
world geography and geopolitics
The Domino Theory
“If Indo-China goes . . .”
“I know the record. Siam goes. Malaya
goes. Indonesia goes. What does ‘go’
mean?”
(Graham Greene, The Quiet American,
1955)
Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves’ own conformation:
and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
— What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.
More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.
“The Map,” North and South, 1946
The 1950s: Cold War and Containment Policy
Domestically:
• HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee)
• clampdown on communists, gays, feminists,
nonconformists, and cultural dissidents
Internationally:
• hemispheric clampdown on left nationalist
governments in Latin America, the Middle East and
Africa; CIA-supported coups in Iran (1953), Guatemala
(1954), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Chile (1973)
• ongoing war in Vietnam (in which the US takes up the
imperial burden surrendered by France after Dien Bien
Phu)
… But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too? …
What similarities –
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts –
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How – I didn’t know any
word for it – how “unlikely” …
“In the Waiting Room,” Geography III, 1976
Homosexuals in Government, 1950
Mr. Chairman, I realize that I am discussing a very delicate
subject … I would like to strip the fetid, stinking flesh off of
this skeleton of homosexuality and tell my colleagues of the
House some of the facts of nature. I cannot expose all the
putrid facts as it would offend the sensibilities of some of you.
It will be necessary to skirt some of the edges, and I use
certain Latin terms to describe some of these individuals.
Make no mistake several thousand, according to police
records, are now employed by the Federal Government. …
Now they are like birds of a feather, they flock together.
Where did they go?
(Rep. Miller of Nebraska, Congressional Record, March 2-April
24, 1950)
Brazil in the 1950s – tourist view
Morro da Providencia favela
in Rio de Janeiro, 1958
The Day Lady Died
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
(continued on next page)
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died” from Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank
O’Hara. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books.