A Poet’s High Argument
Elizabeth Bishop and Christianity
Laurel Snow Corelle
In this original study of Elizabeth Bishop’s lifelong engagement with Christianity, Laurel
Snow Corelle illuminates the ways in which Bishop’s Protestant childhood and reading
of Christian literature, coupled with her deep commitment to agnosticism, inform the
works of this former poet laureate of the United States. Corelle sees in Bishop’s writing
a sophisticated and sustained interrogation of orthodoxy that exquisitely balances
Bishop’s religious upbringing with her agnostic stance and that has until now escaped
thorough examination.
To make her case, Corelle immerses the reader in Bishop’s works and world in order
to convey the rigor, subtlety, and complexity of the poet’s dialogue with historical
Christianity and its literature. At the heart of that engagement are some compelling
peculiarities. Bishop was a self-proclaimed nonbeliever; yet she grew up in two devout
Protestant homes, and she studied Christian literature throughout her life. As a result
some of the perspectives and prejudices voiced in her verse are transparently Protestant. Bishop never claimed to be an intellectual, yet her mature conception of heaven
was a scholar’s paradise: to “read boring books, / old, long, long books, and write down
useless notes.” Placing Bishop’s work in direct relation to some of her favorite Christian
texts and locating her within the intellectual milieu of post–World War II America in
which she wrote brings to the fore the surprising degree to which Bishop’s ambivalence about religion facilitated her poetics.
The study, which spans the course of Bishop’s poetry and draws as well on her letters
and prose, illustrates how she incorporated allusions to scripture and Protestant sacraments in a subversive critique of organized Christianity and how her appropriation of
three traditional genres common to Christian literature—allegory, pastoral elegy, and
spiritual autobiography—advanced her own poetic purposes. In mapping the complex
influence of Christian language and imagery on Bishop’s poetry, Corelle offers fresh
perspectives on reading some of the poet’s most celebrated and enigmatic poems.
Laurel Snow Corelle received her
Ph.D. in English and American literature from Boston University and has
since taught English there, at Babson
College, and elsewhere. An independent scholar, she lives near Boston.
November 2008, 152 pages
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