Chapter 34 - Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and the Lost World of Real Feeling

Summary

Elizabeth Bishop noted that her poetry differed both from the standardized somewhat machine-made Academic poem and from poetry that comes through with a sort of shocking vulgarity and coarseness of mind. Bishop, as Lowell's commentary at the 1964 reading notes, was also a poet who refused to write the standard academic poem fashionable at mid-century, nor did she write the kind of confessional poem that was quickly supplanting it. The critical ambivalence about Losses surfaced in part because Jarrell's postwar subject matter was emerging in that volume, in poems such as Moving. Like Jarrell's late poem The Lost World, moving also frames the perceptions of the child against the more jaded reflections of the adult. The woman's predicament hearkens back to Jarrell's polemical essays criticizing American consumer culture, as she wanders the aisles of the supermarket among the detergents cheer, joy and all vainly seeking their emotional equivalents.