“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?

In letters to friends and in interviews later in life, Elizabeth Bishop repeatedly made clear her low opinion of critical writing. At the same time, much of her own criticism and review work is audacious, original and witty, particularly the long essays she completed as an undergraduate student at Vassar. She also admired the work of contemporary poet-critics like William Empson and Randall Jarrell and once pitched for the job as poetry reviewer of The New Yorker. Close analysis of her own prose and poetry demonstrates the extent to which her own writing was itself a form of informal criticism. She engaged with and incorporated the ideas and words of literary critics into her poetry throughout her career, rebuffing reductive assessments of her writing as “calm” and “modest.”

This chapter focuses on the poet and her archive, offering a brief history of archival acquisition and practice and a discussion of how the expanding archive and changes in literary scholarship have influenced our reading of Bishop as a queer poet. Hicok argues that Bishop’s extensive archive enriches our understanding of mid-century poetry and poetics and provides important documentary evidence of Bishop’s creative process and the various social forces that help to shape a career. Moreover, Hicok argues that Bishop’s poetic practice is itself archival, representing a kind of curatorial poetics that can serve as a case study for understanding the value of archival research for teaching and scholarship in the humanities. Finally, Hicok argues that Bishop’s career, reputation as a poet, and poetic craft cannot be fully understood unless we consider it in the context of her expanding archives and how that has influenced how we read her.