Chapter 8 - Prose

Summary

Prose was both a fascination and a bugbear for Bishop. It fascinated her as a concept aligned with a wished-for sane worldliness, powers of empathy rather than self-expression, and an outward gaze inclusive of modern materials, that could outpace the narcissism encoded (it might seem) within the structures of old-style metrical verse. (She’d have liked to write more fiction, but worried she wasn’t good enough at entering other people’s minds.) Considering – finding exemplarily stylish sentences in – her undergraduate essays, her Time-Life book on Brazil, her introduction to The Diary of “Helena Morley,” her short story “In Prison,” and her memoir “Memories of Uncle Neddy,” I examine Bishop’s approach to prose as a literary form we perhaps still don’t know how to analyze. Doing so, I look closely at the sounds and syntax of individual sentences, finding in her writing moments of caution related to cross-cultural anxieties, and as well as experiences of stylistic liberation.