Chapter 7 - Lyric Poetry

Summary

“Bishop and Lyric” takes up the reception of Bishop’s work in the context of a history of lyricization and gendered poetics in the US. Bishop and writers of her generation rarely identified their work as “lyric,” yet both her critical detractors and fans have cast Bishop’s work as lyric’s exemplar, especially when discussing it in the terms of contemporary debates about poetics, politics, and the subject. After examining the different attachments and understandings of “lyric” in her own poetic culture and that which received her, I go on to ask, what, if anything, “lyric” meant and means to or for Bishop? Does her work resist the anachronistic lyricizing readings that have nevertheless helped to render her one of our “most beloved” “lyric” poets?