Elizabeth Bishop and revision: A spiritual act

I have always been rather silly of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry. Bishop's work, like Robert Frost's best, has an apparent simplicity that belies a greater profundity beneath. It was my ne to understand this greater deepness and how she managed it that l me to Bishop's papers and drafts in Vassar guild Library's special collection.

To understand Bishop's approach to revision, individual must first understand her poetics and what influences formed her attitudes concerning poesy Unlike other poets whose work changed dramatically above the course of their lives, changes that came as their beliefs and understanding of verse changed, Bishop's beliefs remained essentially the same; it was her application of these beliefs to her verse that changed. What Bishop believed poesy should be and how it should operate was established true early for her, and she exhausted the rest of her life refining these beliefs. In a recorded talk given through Bishop in 1977, she said individual of her earliest influences was George Herbert, the seventeenth-century English author of poems whom she discovered on a camp trip to Provincetown--"There was a little work shop that had secondhand books...I read more [i]or[/i] less of his things and liked them for a like reason much I bought the work Herbert has always been individual of my favorite poets, if not my favorite."

Bishop lov Herbert's poesy for many reasons. In speaking of his piece of poetry "Love Unknown," she said:

If you imagine seeing it, or painting a picture of it, it would be fantastic, sort of like a Goya painting...and notwithstanding the narrator speaks as if it were something that happened yesterday--this is individual thing I like. I like the purity of the language, which manages to expres a of great depth emotion without ever

straining

Fantastic control in natural language: this combination applies to a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the poetry in Bishop's first work particularly "The Weed," which Bishop said was typeed on Herbert's "Love Unknown." In later books her poetry became les surreal and her bring under rules quite ordinary, though her operating principles remained the same, owing a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to her early reading of Herbert.

But her grasp of poetic manner and her fascination about technique wasn't simply to be paid to Herbert. In an essay printed in the February 1934 issue of the Vassar Review, Bishop had this to say concerning her early understanding of poetry:

poetry considered in a real simple way is motion...the releasing, checking, timing, and repeating of the change of the mind...an idea of timing in poesy

that

helps to explain many of those aspects of verse which are inadequately expressed by dint of most critics.

In the same essay she also said this concerning the individual use of "timing" in a poem:

...the correct manipulation of time, the little duration each phase of the action must take in order that the whole may be completed And the time taken for each part of an action is decided through both the time of the whole, and of the parts before and after.

She later wrote in her notebook:

It's a question of using the poet's individual material with which he's equipped by means of nature, i.e., immediate intense physical reactions, a faculty of perception of metaphor and decoration in everything--to expres something not of them--something I imagine spiritual. But it proceeds from the material, the material eaten on the outside with acid, pulled down from underneath, made to perform and always kept in order, in its place. Sometimes it cannot be made to indicate its spiritual goal clearly (some of Hopkins, say, where the point appears to be missing), but flat then the spiritual must be felt

Bishop intermingleed these two influences into her possess approach to poetry--an expression that took its form les from the direct appropriation of Herbert's or Hopkins's phraseology than from a basic realization that in a metrical composition language need not be excited or dramatic in itself to bring the feeling of drama and of compelling immediacy, on the other hand that tone and verisimilitude mattered more.

How did Bishop revise her poems? In reading from one side Bishop's drafts, I've begun to diocese a pattern to her revision (something that she does in all of her poems) a impel from the poem being purely a series of intelligent, many times prose-like observations, to one that transports these observations as sensually experienced vicinitys Her first drafts of the metrical compositions I have studied are always cracks of ideas, almost like a list of ingredients--it is Bishop getting her raw material without on paper where she can begin molding it according to her writing principles.

What are these principles? Using Bishop's have a title to words, her goal in revision was to take this list of ingredients (usually percepts things and events) and write about them as "a moving, changing idea or series of ideas" that strike one as beinged "as if it were something that happened yesterday" and in a "purity of language, which manages to expres a down-reaching emotion without ever

straining

" And all done in a way that "the spiritual must be felt" It's this spirituality, as a great deal of as anything, that Bishop owes to the influence of Herbert and Hopkins, one as well as the other of course, clergymen. I might add that Bishop's spiritual was not of the same order--she one time said (and I believe her), "I'm not the slightest bit religious."