Chapter 13 - Romantic and Victorian Poetry

Summary

The essay argues that Bishop sees poems as a series of possibilities to be revisited gratefully, shrewdly, critically, neither agonistically as precursors to battle or displace, nor polemically in the spirit of a literary politics championing a school or movement. It canvasses her relation to a range of nineteenth-century poets, focusing first from the Romantic period on Blake, to whose visionary poetics she adds a skeptical element, and Wordsworth. The essay finds Wordsworthian elements in her use of the word “something,” her intuition that crucial moments combine negativity and revelation, and her central insistence on the provisionality of vision. It then suggests that Bishop was prompted creatively by two Victorian genres: first, the dramatic monologue, with speakers liberated from accuracy and articulate in their egotism; second, nonsense poetry, with its minor-key version of transcendent magic and its frequent link of the “awful but cheerful.” The other abiding Victorian influence was Hopkins, along with Wordsworth and Baudelaire an exemplar dynamically observing his own process of observation.