Elizabeth Bishop's Impersonal Personal

Elizabeth Bishop's Impersonal Personal
Author(s): Bonnie Costello

Source: American Literary History, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Summer, 2003), pp. 334-366
Published by: Oxford University Press
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Elizabeth Bishop's
Impersonal Personal
Bonnie Costello
This article confronts the persistent argument that Elizabeth

Bishop's poems are autobiographical, and the implicit assump-
tion that the self and tradition are unitary and contending reali-
ties. It calls for a shift toward generic and rhetorical models of
lyric subjectivity that remove voice from identity while still allow-
ing for a connection between the poem and history. The article dis-
cusses reception of "Crusoe in England" (Complete Poems 162-
68) as a focused instance of the critical tendency to absorb voice
into author, and vice versa. It presents the poem instead as a con-
figuration of various social impulses struggling toward transition,
and as a meditation on the very problem of negotiating a relation
between particular experience and the generalities of language.
1. Who Speaks for Bishop?
"You wish they'd keep some of these things to themselves,"

Bishop famously complained of confessional poetry. "Now the
idea is that we live in a horrible and terrifying world, and the worst
moments of horrible and terrifying lives are an allegory of the
world" (qtd. in Cory and Lee 69). She kept a great deal to herself,
but for more than a decade criticism has been busy rummaging
through her closets. Connections between Bishop's themes and
images, and her autobiography, are obvious to anyone who reads
her letters or visits the archive at Vassar. Are these connections
necessarily representational? Recent commentary reads a con-
struction of Bishop's personal life back into her poems and as-
sumes the allegory she abhorred in others. Art becomes a circular
activity in which source and end narrowly converge. But Bishop's
poetic intelligence is not so reflexive. Her poems do not so much
veil or transmute the personal as expose the categories of the "per-
sonal" and "impersonal" to scrutiny.
"Bishop would have been uncomfortable with a biographical
? 2003 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY

DOI: 10.1093/ALH/AJGO27
American Literary History 335
study of this sort. ... She had a ferocious sense of privacy," notes
biographer Gary Fountain (xi). Perhaps she also had a sense of
how such publications blur the distinction between the writing
subject and the voice in which we necessarily read (and read into)
the poem. One need not lean on rigid prohibitions against the "in-
tentional fallacy," transcendent claims for the "autonomy" of art,
or even notions of the death of the author, to resist the absorption
of the lyric speaker into the biographical author. My concern here My concern here is...
is not to evaluate the ethics of biographical research, but rather to to examine some of the
contradictions and
examine some of the contradictions and misapprehensions that
misapprehensions that
arise within the criticism emerging from it. These problems are by
arise ... from our
no means unique to Bishop criticism. They arise from our relent- relentless curiosity about
less curiosity about the lives of celebrities, and our perennial un- the lives of celebrities,
certainty about the nature of lyric voice and the relation between and our perennial
the poet, the poem, and society. uncertainty about the
nature of lyric voice and
"Bishop's now virtually mythic story is here told-in the the relation between the
nick of time-by those who knew her best," writes Lloyd Schwartz poet, the poem, and
in his book-jacket endorsement of the oral biography, in which he society.
is a key witness. What this comment unwittingly reveals is the pro-
duction of a myth, which gets read as Bishop's personhood and
projected onto the mythmaking Bishop practices in her poems.
Jacqueline Rose captured just this reflexive fantasy of "Plath" in
her 1991 book The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Like Plath, Bishop
wrote poems that enact the very problems of forging identity and
of linking identity to voice. As with Plath, there are those who
pathologize Bishop, seeing her writing as therapeutic. And there
are those who relish her "perversity" as a mark of her subversive
relation to patriarchy. Some would wrest control of the poet's cor-
pus. (The question of what gets published where and by whom
may not be as contentious as in Plath's case, but it is certainly as
vexed.) The "soap opera" drama of Bishop's psychosocial adven-
tures has emerged in the ostensible quest for the "truth" of
Bishop's inner life (Rose 6). But what Rose says of Plath is true of
Bishop, perhaps of any great writer: "Inside her writing [the poet]
confronts us with the limits of our (and her) knowledge. In this
context it becomes more than a commonplace of recent literary
analysis to insist in advance that there is no direct access to the
writer, that the only thing available for commentary and analysis
is the text" (5).
Recent Bishop critics often acknowledge the historical and
rhetorical dimensions of lyric subjectivity, but ignore them in
practice. As Rose points out, feminist critics of Plath recognized
that the personal is political; however, they did not fully make the
connection to "an inseparability of history and subjectivity" (7).
Similarly, Bishop's critics have celebrated her subversive relation-
336 Elizabeth Bishop's Impersonal Personal
ship to "the Western tradition" rather than emphasizing the many

ways in which that tradition, by no means unitary, might haunt
her and shape her, or recognizing how the "I" of her poems might
emerge as a site of cross-identifications and cultural yearnings
rather than as a coherent self. In reading Bishop we would do well
to remind ourselves of the hermeneutical problem Rose identifies:
"There is no history outside its subjective realisation.. . just as
there is no subjectivity uncoloured by the history to which it be-
longs" (8). Surely the author of Geography III understood this
principle, though the lures of biographical and ideological reduc-
tionism (two sides of the same coin) have distracted us from it.
There have, of course, been exceptions to this reductionism.
Lee Edelman's seminal article, "Geography of Gender: Elizabeth
Bishop's 'In the Waiting Room,' " warns against literalism and or-
ganic models of identity, showing how identity becomes a con-
stricting force of language and culture. The influence of his article
has led more often to arguments for Bishop's alienation from main-
stream culture, however, than to discovery of her fictive manipu-
lations of voice. In The Politics of Form, Mutlu Konuk Blasing
points out the ways that Bishop resists both natural and meta-
physical grounds of identity and truth, recognizing that meaning
and selfhood arise within historical and rhetorical contexts: "If
the textual meaning of personal experience can only be a shared
meaning, it must appeal to a tradition or history of what consti-
tutes meaning within a given discursive framework" (96). Lang-
don Hammer, in a review of books on Bishop from the late 1980s
and early 1990s, noted Bishop's challenge to the model of the writ-
ing self in contemporary lyric autobiography, a model in which
"the poem has its origin in the poet's life, as the voice originates in
the self " (149). Despite Hammer's warning, this model of the writ-
ing self continues to dominate Bishop criticism, even where it es-
pouses a theory of subjectivity as fluent and decentered.
Criticism's desire to control and define both art and the artist,
even in the name of uncontrollable, unstable psychic, linguistic, or
social forces, has produced some troubling distortions. Bishop's
songs are those of an asthmatic, Marilyn May Lombardi asserts.
Her alcoholism is the key to her work, Brett Millier reveals. For
others, Bishop's imagination can be localized in sexual preference.
Her unpublished lesbian love poetry, declares Lorrie Goldensohn,
suggests what kind of poet she might have become if only she had
lived in a less repressive society. Goldensohn announces her mo-
tives starkly: We "hunger for poems that can be shown to be based
on actual experience" because we wish to be "relieved from the
weight of our fictions" (52). In practice this has involved reading
the author anthropomorphically into the lyric voice. Susan Mc-
Cabe's Elizabeth Bishop.: Her Poetics of Loss begins by insisting

on Bishop's interrogation of unified selfhood with its "internal-
ized ... inauthentic narcissism" (105).1 Yet the poet's personal loss
and struggle, as well as the isolation brought on by her lesbianism,
she argues, govern her representations. Bishop's is an "autobio-
graphical stance" (McCabe xx). "We do not have stark confes-
sions," McCabe admits, "but rather passions covert and implied"
(101). This leads her to read the descriptive poem "A Cold Spring"
as a love letter to Jane Dewey, in which the landscape symbolizes
the female body ("your big and aimless hills") toward which the
poet, in the guise of a newborn male calf, having "come out,"
"seemed inclined to feel gay" (117). Bishop's autobiographical im-
pulses, in McCabe's reading, must be reconciled to her ideological
impulses. The calf is male so that Bishop may take on a subversive
relationship to the Romantic gendering of nature as female.2 But
is this how poems get written?
Despite numerous citations of poststructuralist theory, recent
Bishop critics retain a Romantic model of organic personhood in
which the work is an uninterrupted extension of the poet, and the
voice of the poem provides a path back to the life of the writer.
Even those who would acknowledge Bishop's "unRomanticism"
choose to show how her poems "encoded and revealed her life"
(Harrison 20). Bishop may have resisted the confessional model of
the expressive self, but Victoria Harrison implies that it is crying
to get out. "Beginning with a condensed biography," she writes
(recent critics of Bishop almost always begin this way), "I fore-
ground important intimacies of Bishop's life, so that these will res-
onate in or provide a backdrop for my discussion of her poetry's
enacted relationships" (20). Since "to publish a poem about love
was to submerge its gay or lesbian particularities," it follows for
Harrison that all language of pleasurable relation in the poetry is
somehow an oblique variation on Bishop's particular sexuality
(45). "The Map" becomes another register of homoeroticism, dis-
placed through the figure of the peninsulas "like women feeling
for the smoothness of yard-goods" (Complete Poems 3). All inver-
sions in the early poems are an expression of Bishop's sexual in-
version according to Marilyn May Lombardi, who invokes Frank
Kermode's The Genesis of Secrecy (1979) to support her idea that
Bishop's "dark speech" was a "cloaking" of its "carnal" meaning
(The Body and the Song 46).3 The proof for such critics lies in the
unpublished drafts and fragments which, though no one has made
a convincing claim for their literary merit in comparison to pub-
lished work, more concretely "enact same sex love and sexuality"
and thus become the standard by which the published work is
understood. "Her published poetry, with its cool surface and its
secret recesses, therefore demands of its readers a special herme-

neutics" (Lombardi 45). After several pages of gruesome details
about Bishop's eczema, asthma, and related afflictions, Lombardi
writes cheerily that Bishop "uses her physical ailments to develop
a poetic that confronts cultural labels and their stifling impact
on personal and erotic expression" (Closet 68). She continues:
Bishop's "private struggle to bring her swollen form back down to
the scale of human life" is expressed in her poetic struggle to con-
trol tone and form (57). But writing is the struggle to control tone
and form. Bishop did not become a poet because she suffered
from eczema. This hermeneutics requires the exposure of spe-
cific somatic and psychosexual meanings behind apparently in-
determinate lyric moments. Such criticism portrays poetry as
an instrument of deception--secreting the personal sources of
insight while nevertheless seeing the world entirely in terms of
those sources. David Jarraway's "'O Canada!' The Spectral Les-
bian Poetics of Elizabeth Bishop" represents a culmination and
extreme of the psychoanalytic approach in Bishop criticism and
the paradoxical grounding of that approach in autobiography.
Jarraway's logic is dangerously circular: the treatment of subjec-
tivity is oblique because gay subjectivity produces oblique rhet-
oric in an oppressive culture: "hence" (this nudge toward logic
arises almost arbitrarily in these arguments) Bishop's obliquity
is the very portrait of gay subjectivity (245). Jarraway assumes
that there is some uniform or coherent psychological phenome-
non that can be called "lesbian identity" even while the argument
admits that it remains "spectral" and "nonreferential" (245).4 It
is all the more puzzling, then, that Jarraway should begin his ar-
ticle with this remark: "Though the writing of Elizabeth Bishop
(1911-1979) has in the past few years greatly increased aware-
ness about her sexuality, literary critics are still generally reluctant
to talk about that topic"( 243). In fact, they have talked of little
else. For evidence of this "reluctance" Jarraway quotes Alicia
Ostriker's "notable attention to one reviewer's surprise that the
volume [Elizabeth Bishop. Geography and Gender] 'has almost
nothing concrete to say about [Bishop's] lesbianism'" (243).
One wonders, from this thirdhand remark, whether Jarraway or
Ostriker has read that volume of essays, which includes such titles
as "Bishop's Sexual Poetics," "The Body's Roses: Race, Sex, and
Gender in Elizabeth Bishop's Representations of Self," "Eliza-
beth Bishop: Gaiety, Gayness, and Change," "Perversity as Voice,"
and so on. All these articles move from the biographical concrete
to the metaphoric, often through wordplay. That is, they allegorize
a narrow selection of facts of Bishop's sexual and medical history,
then account for a broad range of Bishop's images and strategies

in terms of that allegory, as if it was hers, not theirs.5
As the story of Bishop as a poet of permeable, dynamic, mul-
tiple selfhood gets mapped, ironically, onto reductive biograph-
ical narratives, the force of the poetry's complex subjectivity is
lost. Plath comes to mind again:
It is that provisional, precarious nature of self-representation

which appears so strikingly from the multiple forms in which
Plath writes. What she presents us with, therefore, is not only
the difference of writing from the person who produces it, but
also the division internal to language, the difference of writing
from itself. It is then all the more striking that so many critics
have felt it incumbent upon themselves to produce a unified
version of Plath as writer and as woman, as if that particular
form of fragmentation or indirect representation were some-
thing which, through the completion of their own analysis of
her, they could somehow repair. The frequent diagnoses of
Plath seem to me to have as at least one of their effects, if not
purposes, that they have transposed into a fact of her indi-
vidual pathology the no less difficult problem of the contra-
dictory, divided and incomplete nature of representation it-
self. (Rose 5)
There is an obvious sense, of course, in which these critics are

right: private experiences and impulses shape and determine our
worldview; imagination is in some sense "inextricable" from the
givens of our lives. There is no need to invoke the purities of New
Criticism or to construct a simplistic divide between poet and
speaker. Private experience largely shapes the range of a poet's
concerns and is inevitably reflected in her representations. In dis-
closing biographical material, archival research has connected
those givens to the made world of art. But it has exercised no re-
straint in doing so, and has made imagination a mere function of
personal psychology, mistaking psychological and biographical
origins for the meaning and direction of the work. Each of these
critics acknowledges the poet's "transmutations" and "transmo-
grifications" of the personal-from "the body" to "the song," as
Lombardi puts it-yet very little attention is turned to the song it-
self, not just its formal properties but its rhetorical ones, in creat-
ing the effect of an individual voice. Such studies appeal on the
one hand to our desire for something factual and localized, some-
thing real, in relation to the ethereal freedom and possibility of
poetry. Like Crusoe, we never feel quite at home in our fictions. We
340 Elizabeth Bishop 's Impersonal Personal
crave our "real shade" and yet we are restless in these particulars
too, looking for ways to endow them anew with allegorical im-
port, to extrapolate from them a radical account of the world.
The Romantic model defines an individual who exists inde-
pendent of social structures, and who can thus stand singly
against them. "Bishop questions not only the dominant phallic
perspective of our culture but its corollary political categories, hi-
erarchies and prejudices," writes Jacqueline Brogan (176). Bishop
"aims at nothing short of freedom from the inherently dualistic
tradition that lies at the very heart of Western tradition," claims
Joanne Diehl (6). But hasn't the Western tradition been trying to
get beyond dualism ever since Descartes? Bishop might equally be
seen as profoundly invested in the Western tradition's habit of
questioning. The accounts of Bishop as a subversive poet, moti-
vated by her personal alienation, falter once one begins to read the
letters. The Bishop of the letters-impatiently complaining of
Third World conditions, the sloppiness of Brazilian culture, the
sluggishness and insubordination of the servants, and the general
uncompliance of the world with her expectations of it-is often
the very persona that the poems ("Arrival at Santos," "Brazil, Jan-
uary 1, 1502,"and "Manuelzhino," for instance) seem to under-
mine through irony and contradiction. Which is the real Bishop?
Or are we up against not only the difference of life and art, but of
writing with itself? Rather than read Bishop as an individual stand-
ing against a monolithic and oppressive tradition, it might be
more useful to consider a lyric subjectivity taking shape in relation
to the contradictory and unarticulated aspirations of the culture.
And perhaps it is time to put aside the idea of Bishop's art as the
default or therapeutic position of an alcoholic-asthmatic-lesbian-
homeless orphan cloaking and allegorizing personal experience,
for an idea of art she herself articulated: "What one wants in art,
in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its cre-
ation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration" (Ltr. to
Anne Stevenson, 8 Jan. 1964).
2. Tradition and the Individual Talent
Bishop's version of the impersonal quoted above takes Dar-

win as example, and refers to the pull of the physical world. But
the making of art also forgets the self in the pull toward the social
and the aspiration for community. If Bishop's poems, like Plath's,
remind us that we cannot know the self, they also remind us that
the poem is a social gesture, not just an alienated critique.
Theodor Adorno's "Lyric Poetry and Society" offers one version
of this idea. He argues that the poet's intense engagement with

language involves a drive toward noninstrumental communica-
tion, and ultimately thus toward self-forgetting. "From a condi-
tion of unrestrained individuation, the lyric work strives for,
awaits the realm of the general... the generality of the lyric
poem's content... is essentially social" (57). This "individua-
tion" is not the false consciousness of bourgeois individualism
that invites speculation about the psychology of the speaking sub-
ject, nor is the "general" here identified with ideology, or the con-
sensus in tradition of a group or race. Rather, poetry connects
individual voice to "the entirety of society as a unit of contradic-
tions" (57). That entirety is contained within language as its "col-
lective substratum" to be distinguished from the depersonalized,
abstract language of collectivity. As Susan Hahn has pointed out,
in Adorno's theory "the poet ceases to relate instrumentally to
language and the self. The poet is thus capable of forgetting him-
self, by cultivating a condition of selflessness or impersonality, by
making of himself a vessel for the ideal of pure language" (67).
Adorno's language can seem almost mystical: "The most sublime
lyric works ... are those in which the subject, without a trace of
his material being, intones in language until the voice of language
itself is heard. The subject's forgetting himself... and this direct
intimacy and spontaneity of his expression are the same" (62). In
Adorno's ideal, the impersonal (as opposed to the depersonal-
ized) and authenticity are reconciled. But his examples are drawn
not only from this sublime ideal of authenticity, but also from in-
stances in which "society's inner contradictory relationships man-
ifest themselves in the poet's speaking" (65). The poet's drive to-
ward community is not, then, the submission of her will to a group
narrowly defined, but rather the gathering into an aesthetic unity
of the various and even dissonant voices of a society aspiring to
community. One does not need to share Adorno's utopian vision
of art, or even his post-Marxist understanding of society, to ap-
preciate his defense of the lyric's social, as opposed to ideological,
content. While language allows for great particularity, creating
"configurations that submit to all possible stirrings of emotion" it
remains "a medium of concepts and ideas [that establishes] our in-
dispensable relation to generalities and hence to social reality"
(62). What the lyric does, then, is draw on the "collective substra-
tum" in language where "society's inner contradictory relation-
ships" reside, to communicate, spontaneously, a new configura-
tion from within it. Ultimately, for Adorno, "neither the private
person of the poet, his psychology, nor his so-called social view-
point, come into question..,. what matters is the poem itself as a
philosophical sundial of history" (65). Literary language is part of
the larger contradictory wholeness of language, so that the history

of the former is marked by and marks the history of the latter. The
collective substratum with its inner contradictions would include
historically propelled genres and archetypes, and even individual
works in their historical reception. The individuation of lyric is
not something prior to this historically dynamic whole, nor is it to
be deduced from it. It shapes it and is shaped by it.
Adorno does not take up the problem of the dramatic mono-
logue or modernist persona poem per se. He focuses on more
purely lyric forms, although he shows how these are increasingly
embattled in the modern lyric as it speaks from the pressures of in-
dustrial society, where the idealism of lyric seems remote. Indeed,
the persona poem would seem to be a particularly clear embodi-
ment of what Adorno represents as the modern condition of lyric,
in which "the Possible stubbornly flashes its rays over lyric po-
etry's own impossibility" (68). We distance ourselves from the ex-
tremities of the subject in modern dramatic monologue, yet we en-
tertain those extremities as we read the poem, holding them in
solution rather than in ironic disdain.
Of course Bishop had not read Adorno, but she had read
T. S. Eliot's essays, and her way of understanding them bears sur-
prising comparison with Adorno. She read Eliot's "tradition," at
least, in the broadest sense. Her "past" would include all kinds of
cultural and linguistic residue, not just artistic tradition. And she
undermined the monolithic and autonomous vision of literature.
Her tradition is a historical residue. The "presence" of the past
was for Bishop only partially legible, more a haunting than a sta-
bilizing of the historical moment. She began her college essay,
"Dimensions for a Novel," by quoting this passage from "Tradi-
tion and the Individual Talent": "The existing order is complete
before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the super-
vention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so
slightly, altered .... This is the conformity between the old and
new" ("Dimensions for a Novel" 97). In general critics have as-
sumed that Bishop needed to overcome the influence of modernist
"impersonality" in order to realize her full potential as a poet. But
James Longenbach has challenged this "breakthrough narrative"
by pointing out that Bishop read Eliot more subtly than we do
now. For all his enthusiasm for a "complete," "ideal," and "mon-
umental order," Eliot recognized its historical dynamic: "Whoever
has approved this idea of order will not find it preposterous that
the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is
directed by the past" ("Tradition" 50). Here Eliot reveals, as Lon-
genbach points out, "Eliot's investment in post-Hegelian skepti-
cism and his resulting awareness of the contingency of anything
like impersonality" (23). Bishop's story "The Sea and Its Shore"
presents the "order" as decidedly fragmented and transient, some-
thing altered by its ingestion in the present. Tradition is a series of
scraps of paper, with variant messages, both literary and demotic,
blowing around on a beach. While such detritus may not consti-
tute a "collective substratum" or a "monumental order," yet it is
difficult for the narrator to distinguish the beach from the papers,
so inscribed is the present reality with the representations of it that
accumulate. It is not that we have mistaken language for the
world, but that the world, especially the social reality, comes to us
in the form of language, undergoing constant changes of contour.
"The sand itself... looked a little like printed paper" (Collected
Prose 179). This text-soaked world has no ideological structure:
"The papers had no discernable goal, no brain, no feeling of race
or group" (174). The protagonist struggles to find, or rather to cre-
ate, an intelligible unity in all these scraps. Yet the "pastness of the
past and also its presence" continues to define for Bishop the
space of poetry, the individual talent, and the subjectivity of the
narrative, emerging in the effort toward meaningful configura-
tion. Her protagonist Boomer has no clearly defined identity
apart from the papers he tries, often unsuccessfully, to read in ref-
erence to himself. We might be tempted to view the image of this
character (given in the beginning of the story and repeated at
the end), "in some ways like a Rembrandt, but in some ways not"
(180), as a key to autobiographical reading. But Rembrandt's self
portraits are famously elusive as well as absorbing, forging as
much as disclosing identity. In another way the reference dis-
places autobiography, putting not Bishop but an Old Master at
the site of self-scrutiny, just as she will do later with Crusoe.6
Like Eliot, Bishop aimed to write poetry that would partici-
pate in something larger than the self. What have been called
"cloaks" or "shrouds" in Bishop, designed for self-protection,
might better be understood as "masks" in the more classical sense,
designed for symbolic expansion, and engagement with the "gen-
erality" (to use Adorno's word) of language. In modern poetry the
mask has been a device allowing for individuation of voice with-
out unitary subjectivity, and for connecting ideas (the general and
abstract realm of language) to experience-not personal experi-
ence, but particularity. Perhaps this is why Bishop borrowed
Eliot's method for "Crusoe in England" long after she had aban-
doned, as critics generally agree, other aspects of his style. The ab-
stracted, psychological landscape, the allusiveness, the fictional
persona, all recall Eliot's early poetry, and suggest that Bishop
was carrying forward, rather than breaking through, modernist
assumptions.
3. Who Is Crusoe?
Ian Watt long ago identified the story of Robinson Crusoe as

one of the "great myths of our civilization" (288); as such, it ex-
presses some aspect of "the aspirations of Western man" (288).
Watt goes on to point out that those aspirations are changing and
conflicting, and that myth is subject to the contradictory impulses
of history. "It is not an author but a society that metamorphoses
a story into a myth; by retaining only what its unconscious needs
dictate" (290). And Robinson Crusoe, as myth, has come to rep-
resent competing ideologies: "Back to Nature" (expressed in Rous-
seau's Emile), "The Dignity of Labor" (Protestant Ethic, Max
Weber), and "Homo Economicus" (Karl Marx). In our own time
Crusoe has come to represent exile and dissociation from the
moorings of tradition (hence his appearance not only in Bishop
but in Paul Valery, Karl Shapiro, George Oppen, John Ashbery,
Derek Walcott, and other major poets and novelists of our time),
even those traditions that originally encoded him. All of these
interpretations still haunt us (most recently, in the series "Sur-
vivor" and the movie Cast Away [2001]). Defoe may have en-
gendered Crusoe and gendered him, but he does not control the
archetype's evolution. We tend to treat influences and allusions
in isolation, and critics have made comparisons between Defoe's
and Bishop's texts, forgetting that Defoe and Crusoe are not the
same, that the connections are not person to person but pass
through social and cultural history, and that the earlier figure is
experienced as part of a larger, already repeatedly transformed,
cultural formation. Bishop witnessed this transformation directly
when restoration of a slave church in Ouro Preto exposed a mu-
ral of Crusoe, "umbrella, goats and all-gilt on red lacquer pan-
els" (Ltr. to Anne Stevenson 15 Aug. 1965). The slave who once
modeled Friday has organically appropriated Crusoe as an ar-
chetype. (Walcott was of course acutely aware of this inversion
in his own appropriation of the myth.) Informed by Watt, we
may consider the Crusoe Bishop projects as voice not as a de-
terminate figure with whom she either identifies or argues, but
as a channel for the dialectical processes of history. Bishop takes
up the myth of Crusoe within a different culture, with a different
set of aspirations and stresses that collide with the ones that gave
rise to it. Bishop's version of the story is haunted by all the conflict-
ing readings it has had over time-Crusoe's fragmentary legacy-
and it reflects tensions and yearnings of her own historical mo-
ment which these past interpretations have not addressed.
Yet critics have tended to read "Crusoe in England" prima-
rily in terms of personal psychology and social viewpoint. "Cru-
soe in England," Millier remarks, is "as close as [Bishop] gets to

verse autobiography"(447). For these readers the poem's engage-
ment with the literary and cultural past is less a gesture of com-
munity-an awakening of the "collective substratum" of a social
reality with all its inner contradictions-than another marker of
personal loss and disaffection: "Bishop's muted connection to
tradition mirrors her silenced lesbian relationships, along with
their eventual loss" (McCabe 197). A trope is treated as a thera-
peutic device, like a child using a doll to tell about abuse. Diehl
writes: "Casting her story as Crusoe's enables Bishop to deal with
subjects that would otherwise remain unspoken because they were
overtly threatening or simply too overt" (21). Yet the first nine of
the twelve verse paragraphs of "Crusoe in England" have no ex-
plicit connection to Friday, who for such readers signifies Lota
and homoerotic love, presumably the subject Diehl imagines to
be "threatening" in a more overt form. On the contrary, Friday
makes a late appearance in the poem, which is mostly about soli-
tude, hardly a forbidden topic for lyric. Even such a devoted friend
as Frank Bidart calls her "magnificently inconsistent" in her re-
sistance to the "confessional" label: "For example, someone once
said something to her about how 'Crusoe in England' is a kind of
autobiographical metaphor for Brazil and Lota. She was horrified
by the suggestion. And obviously the poem is" (qtd. in Fountain
333). Or is it? How much of the poem can actually be accounted
for in these terms? While the stimulus and even the raw material of
the poem may have been personal experience, should it be read as
a metaphorfor the poet's personal experience in any pointed sense?
And which personal experience? Bishop had been fascinated by
the story of Crusoe from her earliest days. Long before her life in
Brazil she had read it as a narrative of "making things in a pinch"
(Bishop, Notebook).7 Lota's death occurred years after the poem
was nearly complete in draft form. And when identity enters a
metaphoric structure, does it remain as the signified? As Virginia
Woolf put it in The Second Common Reader, in which she com-
plains of the excesses and irrelevancies of biographical criticism:
"[I]f we knew the very moment of Defoe's birth and whom he
loved and why..,. should we suck an ounce of additional pleasure
from Robinson Crusoe, or read it one whit more intelligently?...
Our task is to master his perspective" (51). And in "Crusoe in
England" we must allow that the perspective arises within cross-
identifications and may not be the expression of a unified self.
The device of the mask foregrounds the difference between
the poet and the lyric subject. Robert Langbaum's classic study of
dramatic monologue showed how this difference allows the reader
to participate in both sympathy and judgment, to enter into ex-
346 Elizabeth Bishop s Impersonal Personal
traordinary emotional, moral, or historical positions to which the

writer is not fully committed. At the same time the reader could
recognize the distance of such a position from his or her own
norms, and the normative (rhetorical and historical) nature of his
or her own positions. The form itself, for Langbaum, reflects a his-
torical condition:
We adopt a man's point of view and the point of view of his

age in order to judge him-which makes the judgment rela-
tive, limited in applicability to the particular conditions of
the case. This is the kind of judgment we get in the dramatic
monologue, which is for this reason an appropriate form for
an empiricist and relativist age, an age which has come to
consider value as an evolving thing dependent upon the
changing individual and social requirements of the historical
process. For such an age judgment can never be final, it has
changed and will change again; it must be perpetually
checked against fact. (108)
One of the things that distinguishes the modern dramatic mono-

logue-Eliot's "Gerontion" or Bishop's "Crusoe in England"-is
how this historicizing relativism is built into the texture of the
voice itself, which becomes loosed from any single historical posi-
tion without becoming ahistorical. The figure retains the effect of
individuality that invites sympathy and judgment. Bishop's Cru-
soe speaks from the shocks of the historical process and from the
uneasiness and yearning that form the burden of a relativistic age.
The modern dramatic monologue marks a distinction not
just between life and art, artist and speaker, but internally, within
representation, especially in the case of a recast classic. To collapse
that difference into a unity-either autobiographical (the poem as
veil) or ideological (the poem as antagonism)-is to ignore the
complexity of a trope embedded in what it examines. An essential
dissonance and irresolution characterizes the persona, even
within the artistically seamless whole of the poem. Crusoe indeed
vents the very problem at hand: the unrecoverable origin in lan-
guage and the indeterminacy of the lyric subject: "They named
it. But my poor island's still / un-rediscoverable, un-renameable. /
None of the books has ever got it right" (162). What existence
does Crusoe have independent of the literature, which has "never
got it right"? In one sense the poem's opening seems to announce
the disclosure of the personal. This book will rediscover and re-
name. This book will get it right. But one hears the same ambigu-
ity in Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck" with its "book of
myths, in which our names do not appear" (22). On one hand,

Rich makes a didactic point about the absence of women in a pa-
triarchal history; she will see to it that their names are included in
the future. But Rich also implies that by definition the personal
individual does not, perhaps cannot, and should not appear in a
book of myths, or any fiction, which is by its very nature general
and impersonal to us. (The poem is not our map to Rich's failed
marriage and husband's suicide, for instance.) We cannot, Rich's
poem implies, make the journey to the unconscious vicariously or
voyeuristically. The words of a poem are maps to an unrediscov-
erable country. Rich's very private dive leads not into a reification
of the individual, but to a collective substratum, "the half de-
stroyed instruments that once held a course," the repository of
broken social formations, the "We are, I am, you are" of a non-
totalized social reality, "the voice of men between whom barriers
have fallen" (Adorno 72). (Given the insight of her poem, it is
surprising that Rich was so insistent on locating the personal in
Bishop's work, and that she was only satisfied with the poems
once she could identify what she saw as their lesbian code.)8 The
"un-re" construction of Bishop's opening and the temporal im-
balance of past (unrediscovered) and future (unrenameable) resist
a determinant reading. (Bishop attempted several adjectives be-
fore she "got it right." The draft of this poem at Houghton Library
strikes out "irrecoverable" and "implausible.") Crusoe complains
about his own representation, but also announces the historicity
of language and the failure of past generalities to fix particular ex-
perience. Bishop creates in "Crusoe in England" an archetypal
figure with the presence of the individual and thereby submits the
generalizations of language to the historical force of particulars.
Rather than thinking of the poem as personal testimony or
counterideology, we might read it as the site for an emergent per-
spective, in which the poet expresses the unfulfilled aspirations of
her culture even as she writes within established forms and points
of view. In this sense the poem is a unique pattern made from what
Lionel Trilling called "the kaleidoscope of historical elements"
(184). Trilling wisely reminds us not to simplify the historical sense
into a narrow matrix (18). But Bishop's Crusoe does focus two
salient, contradictory structures for man's relation to nature--in-
strumental reason (the authority of the impersonal) and visionary
power (the authority of the personal)-both of which arise within
a myth of atomic individualism. We tend to forget when reading
Bishop's poem that the Romanticism she evokes saw itself as a
counterforce rather than a succession to the Enlightenment prin-
ciples that Defoe embodies in Robinson Crusoe. And both of these
myths are residual in the unnamed representations of Bishop's

own time: the Death of God, the Descent of Man, and the Will to
Power. Bishop's Crusoe speaks from within these structures, still
fetching supplies off the ship, even as he expresses desires they fail
to satisfy. In this sense Adorno might recognize her poem as "a
philosophical sundial of history" (65).
Crusoe the enlightenment scientist (he knows something
about geology, zoology, astronomy) is haunted, in Bishop's inver-
sion, by modern science-relativity, the uncertainty principle, and
various other unhingings of positivism. He is especially haunted
by Darwin, the writer who sounded the death knell of religion and
humanism. He pursued knowledge not so much instrumentally as
compulsively, without hope of encyclopedic mastery.
I had to live
one each and every one, eventually
for ages, registering their flora,
their fauna, their geography.
Of course this image of "the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on
facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the un-
known" (Bishop, Ltr. to Anne Stevenson, 8 Jan. 1964) "coincides"
with the figure of Bishop emerging from three prior volumes of
"geography." This would explain the attraction of the figure for her
rather than its significance. Her Crusoe's religion is similarly
haunted by a history of its undoing. Christianity isn't just "left
out," as she said, from the poem; it is conspicuously absent, an ab-
sence that is itself a legacy from the modern poets she admired.
Defoe's Crusoe invents double-column bookkeeping and finds
that God is in the black. But Bishop's Crusoe has passed through
Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and others who set the world per-
manently off balance.
After Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the primary figure haunt-
ing Bishop's Crusoe is of course William Wordsworth, or rather,
Wordsworth's lyric "I." Wordsworth's presence in this poem
follows from Rousseau's misappropriation of the Crusoe myth
as a celebration of man's happiness in the state of nature. While
Alexander Selkirk, upon whom Robinson Crusoe is based, would
"dance among the goats," Defoe's man is much too practical for
such antics. Romanticism transfigured the Crusoe myth into a cel-
ebration of solitude and communion with nature. Bishop admit-
ted to Lowell that she was a "nature lover," but the redemptive
possibilities of the natural landscape are quickly withdrawn in this
poem. The draft of the poem at Houghton Library explicitly re-
futes the promise of pastoral:
not green & dripping, dressed in full-grown trees

with shafts of sunlight on them
and birds starting up to sing,
-merely a wisp of smoke ten miles away,
a black fleck in the glass, low down[.]
Wordsworth not only extolled the beauty of nature; he ex-

tended Enlightenment individualism and rational self-interest to
a visionary power, which turned it inside out. But solitude does
not seem to fill the modern poem's blanks. By presenting Crusoe
first as an explorer-observer recording scientific and aesthetic
data (the island he sees in the distance is "basalt, probably," the
waterspouts are "hexagonal," etc.), then as a contemplative poet
transfiguring nature (snail shells look like fertile iris beds, the gulls
sound like trees in a strong wind, evoking the thought of pastoral
shade), Bishop represents a historical logic. The Romantic im-
pulse arises from longings unsatisfied within the scientific and
formalist worldview, longings for an extension of the personal
into the interpersonal. The waterspouts are "beautiful, yes, but
not much company." In seeking "company," Crusoe enacts the
Romantic impulse to turn objects into subjects by projecting the
self onto nature. But the slightly personified elements of the land-
scape-the "throats" of the volcanoes, the "feet" of the water-
spouts, the eyes of the irises-are vestigial, grotesque and un-
stable, since she is writing in a later moment. Modernity's Nature
(not just Darwin's but Thomas Hardy's, and even Marianne
Moore's) doesn't have a human face or voice, does not confirm our
personhood. The billy goat's eyes "express nothing, or a little mal-
ice." If Romanticism arose out of discontent with scientific imper-
sonality, its own solutions are similarly lost to historical process.
Well, I tried
Reciting to my iris-beds,
"they flashed upon that inward eye,
which is the bliss. . ." the bliss of what?
One of the first things that I did
When I got back was look it up.
In calling herself a "minor female Wordsworth," critics sug-

gest, Bishop was masking a subversive relationship to this loom-
ing figure. But the struggle with Wordsworth here has more to do
with the lyric subject, who represents the experience of cultural
legacy, rather than with the poet herself. The challenge to ideal-
ized solitude is itself inherited, and draws from pre-Romantic as
well as modern sources. Indeed, the critique of solitude comes
from Defoe, who recognized the tragic isolation inherent in his

portrait of economic man, and wrestled with the meaning of his
creation in Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Ad-
ventures of Robinson Crusoe. The first chapter is called "Of Soli-
tude" and has this as its epigraph: "How uncapable to make us
happy, and / How unqualify'd to a Christian life" (243). Defoe, in
the mask of Crusoe, spends the first several paragraphs of this text
acknowledging the passion of self-interest and the profound "si-
lence of life" that results from the circle of self-interest. "Every
Thing revolves in our Minds by innumerable circular Motions, all
centring in our selves. ... The World, I say, is nothing to us, but as
it is more or less to our Relish: All Reflection is carry'd Home, and
our Dear-self is, in one Respect, the End of Living" (244). But af-
ter this long acknowledgement of our self-centeredness, Crusoe
admits that he enjoyed no happy "solitude" on his island. "How is
it afflicting, while a Man has the Voice of his Soul to speak to God,
and to himself?" (244). Perhaps predictably, from an eighteenth-
century writer, the aloneness of the self-circular being leaves him
unsatisfied and longing for society. "Man is a creature so formed
for society, that it may not only be said that it is not good for him
to be alone, but 'tis really impossible he should be alone" (245).
(Defoe may here be arguing with Michel de Montaigne's "Of Soli-
tude.") Yet the "Silence of Life" pervades his social existence as
well, and Defoe seems unable to shrug off the emotional price of
becoming economic man. As Watt has pointed out, "The essay is
inconclusive, and there are several different strands of thought in
it. But the bitterness of isolation as a primordial fact repeatedly
moves Defoe to a great fervor of communication" (305). Defoe is
not, then, the coherent embodiment of the "Western Tradition."
His text expresses a model of atomic individualism prevailing in
his society, but also a yearning for something else which also arises
there. Toward the end of the essay Crusoe claims that he can more
"enjoy ... solitude" in London "while I am writing this" than in
all his years on the island (245). But the profound "silence of life"
that haunts all speech lingers as a bitter legacy for this hero of ra-
tional self-interest (245). Romantic writers themselves recognized
the limits of this myth of man alone. The "Back to Nature" move-
ment of the 1960s and 1970s took Thoreau's Walden as its guide-
book, and his chapter "Of Solitude" stands as contrast to Crusoe's
experience. But Bishop would probably also have read Keats's
first published poem, "To Solitude," which appears to answer
Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely." Wordsworth could revive his
bliss within the city, but Keats, like Bishop's Crusoe, finds little to
distinguish solitude from loneliness. "O Solitude! if I must with

thee dwell, / Let it not be among the jumbled heap / Of murky
buildings" (6). Rural solitude is better, but far from ideal. His
"soul's pleasure" is rather "the sweet converse of an innocent
mind." It is "Almost the highest bliss of human-kind, I When to thy
haunts two kindred spirits flee" (6). While Keats presumably had
someone other than Friday in mind as kindred spirit, the answer
to Wordsworth anticipates Bishop. Eliot would also expose this
troubling silence within the din of society, and describe his un-
fulfilled longing for intimate conversation, in "The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock." In expressing the unsatisfied yearnings of
atomic individualism, then, Bishop is not standing alone against
Western tradition, or relaying her personal experience; she is giv-
ing individual voice to an aspiration for community that echoes
throughout the language, even in times least agreeable to it.
Bishop encounters Crusoe through the lens of her own time,
with its anti-Romantic and antipositivist philosophies, its vocab-
ulary of "relativity," "uncertainty," "evolution," and its proposi-
tion of existence before essence. What appears in the telescope as
an island might be a fly. If our instruments of measurement affect
what we measure, the superperspectives of these instruments also
undermine the experiential standards of observation. If we are
"home-made," this freedom of self-creation brings only tempo-
rary gaiety. Existentialism is a "miserable philosophy" by com-
parison to the great philosophies of the past, which seemed to give
coherence and significance to human life. In a draft of the poem
in the Vassar archive, Bishop had written "insecure philosophy."
And while "miserable" better captures the mood of this Crusoe,
"insecure" indeed describes a modern temperament, which is
hardly empowered by its disinheritance. Defoe's Crusoe cries out
to the Lord to pity him and the good Lord eventually makes him
rich. Bishop's postexistentialist Crusoe makes a temporary home
in self-pity. But this "home" is narrow and hollow, having none
of the Romantic internal infinite to fill its spaces. Crusoe's legs
dangle over the crater's edge (the crater itself a figure for the inner
life?) as he tells himself that "pity should begin at home:" Forget-
ting "charity" is more than a sardonic wink at the shallowness of
homespun morality. Charity, caritas, loving thy brother as thyself,
not as an object of possession or an extension of identity, is pre-
cisely the forgotten impulse in the ethics of all these philosophies.
Yet Bishop does not offer a utopian counterideology to subvert
them. She creates, rather, an individual voice expressing a protest
of the present through a residual longing for the past. She conveys,
too, the persistent longing for human connection that arises in-
evitably within all systems of distinction, the need not only to mas-
ter but to love another.
5. Who Is Friday?
The question of who Crusoe is cannot be separated, of

course, from the question of who Friday is. They are as much a
single entity in canonical memory as Quixote and Panza. The per-
sonal and the political come together most intensely here. The
Other for whom Bishop's Crusoe longs does not speak and little is
said of him. In this sense he is an aspect of Crusoe, both dramati-
cally in the poem and in terms of the cultural logic from which
Crusoe is formed. But James Merrill wanted to know more. "The
poem's last line, it's true, gives the full resonance of feeling earlier
withheld or deflected into the landscape + fauna. Yet I wondered:
why that faintly dismissive tone-'poor boy' and his prettiness?
Why that, I mean, without some expression of the relation that
makes him 'dear' as well" (19 Apr. 1974). Readers have been quick
to decode Crusoe's reticence as the expression of ineffable and for-
bidden feeling, in contrast to Robinson Crusoe's famous lack of
sentiment. But the essentially erotic (as opposed to economic) na-
ture of this relationship is fairly explicit in the poem, even amus-
ing in its striptease and its epoch and gender crossing "if only he
had been a woman." Something more complex is going on than
Bishop's unutterable personal loss or feelings about the love that
dare not speak its name. Merrill's questions focus a central prob-
lem in trying to assign a unitary identity to Crusoe, or to Friday,
and reveal again that the poem is designed to expose the "inner
contradictoriness" embedded in language.
As critics have repeatedly noted, gender and geography
come together in Bishop's last volume. Friday clearly carries the
burden ofhomoerotic, transcultural, and even transracial themes.
Postcolonial theory is relevant to all of Bishop's poetry about
Brazil, and Crusoe's failure of mastery has been interpreted in re-
lation to an imperialist legacy. But again, Bishop's rhetorical strat-
egy invites sympathy as well as judgment. The representation of
Friday suggests a historical process rather than a simple critique
of the Western tradition. In the passages on Friday especially, the
rhetoric of objectification and hierarchical mastery contends
with a relational rhetoric of felt connection. In this we might see
her extending beyond Joseph Conrad, who identifies "the horror"
of colonialism, but conveys only revulsion in the proximity of
the Other. Bishop was rereading Conrad while in Brazil. Indeed,

Bishop's letter to Lowell mentions Conrad ("Coming down on the
boat I started reading Conrad") in the same paragraph that de-
scribes Aruba in terms suggestive of "Crusoe in England": "Aruba
is a little hell-like island. . .. It rarely if ever rains there and there's
nothing but cactus hedges and prickly trees and goats and one
broken-off volcano" (Bishop, One Art 349). Heart of Darkness
seems the most relevant text for Bishop, with its proximities of
wilderness and civilization, cannibalism and commerce, and its
disaffected narrator, Marlow (a tonal kin to Bishop's Crusoe).9
Conrad's story haunts her poem "In the Waiting Room" as well.
The poem's colonial figures of Osa and Martin Johnson, juxta-
posed to its possibly cannibal victim, "dead man slung on a pole,"
imply a contagion as well as a contrast (Complete Poems 159). The
waiting room itself exposes a "heart of darkness," the void be-
neath language and culture, and transforms the narrator's sense of
self and world. Kurtz's intimacy with the savage is of course a kind
of enormous egoism growing out of a hollow selfhood, the logical
extreme of imperialism. Marlowe entertains no such intimacy, re-
maining the observer, entrenched in the discourse of otherness
that has created the structure he abhors. The connection to Con-
rad reminds us that in Defoe, Friday, before he is a slave, had been
a cannibal, and that cannibalism becomes for Crusoe the touch-
stone for anxiety about his own cultural predation. Bishop has
"left out" this central image of colonialism's other, but it lurks in
the poem, in Crusoe's horror of "slitting a baby's throat mistaking
it / for a baby goat." The passage recalls the anxiety of Defoe's
Crusoe, as he negotiates the distinctions between satisfying his ap-
petites by slaughtering fellow creatures, and Friday's nasty habit
of consuming his fellow man. Bishop's Crusoe is haunted, that is,
by Conrad's inversions of the colonial paradigm, in which the sav-
age lurks within the civilized man. This inversion is already latent
in Defoe's story where, as Carol Houlihan Flynn has shown, the
oppositional structure of savage and civil is belied within the
"consumptive fictions" of physical economy in Defoe's world (423).
Bishop's relational image of the Crusoe-Friday connection is
not finally Conradian, however; it expresses the yearning for an al-
ternative discourse, though it does not shift out of an older one.
Bishop may indeed have felt this crux between the hegemonic and
the relational by falling in love with an aristocratic woman in an
underdeveloped country. The boundaries between self and Other,
whether in terms of gender or in terms of geography, become un-
certain in the poem. But this uncertainty does not point back to
the poet's private life or convey her anti-imperialist ideology. The
poem's language makes it clear that these tensions are embedded

in the culture, and that they are not easily resolved into a holistic
stance.
The most abstract, generalizing, and depersonalized words

in the lexicon can become sites for these contradictory impulses,
and emergent discourses: "Friday was nice. / Friday was nice and
we were friends." The repetition of the word nice draws attention
to its blandness or lack of sentiment, but also to conflicts of mean-
ing. (The same is true of the word pretty, also used twice.) Through-
out the poem Crusoe's language is impoverished, but here it is
conflicted. Nice may hold a residue of social propriety, instru-
mentality, and exclusivity. Bishop was "deep in the poems" of D.
H. Lawrence during her college years and undoubtedly knew
"The English Are So Nice" (One Art 37), in which the word ap-
pears eighteen times with all its snobbish permutations and nice
distinctions. And she might have remembered the erotic grotesque
in Eliot's "Whispers of Immortality," "Griskin is nice," especially
since Eliot compares her to a "Brazilian jaguar." But in Bishop's
poem the word lets in a desire for something else, something like
generosity and fellowship. Crusoe admits, within the impersonal
assertion "I wanted to propagate my kind" that Friday is indeed
of his "kind" (thus overriding the racial difference that under-
scores the master-slave logic of Robinson Crusoe). And this kind-
ness, this sense of caritas and eros, comes through in "and so did
he, I think, poor boy." The "I think" is familiar Bishop caution
about the limits of intimacy and knowledge and boy (Robinson
Crusoe's term for all racial others within his power) reasserts the
difference that kind overrides. In the voice of Crusoe the tension
between kind and boy marks a broader cultural movement, the
aspiration toward love struggling to assert itself within the struc-
ture of racial, economic, and social domination.
Bishop replied to Merrill that there had been more about
Friday, but that she had thought it "boring" and cut it out. (There
is no evidence of such passages in the extant drafts.) "I still like
'poor boy'-because he was a lot younger; and because they
couldn't 'communicate' (ghastly word) much, Crusoe guesses at
Friday's feelings" (Apr. 1974). Here Bishop insists on the fiction
(Lota was close to Bishop's age, her social superior, and spoke ex-
cellent English), yet admits new meaning into it. The binary of
the colonial model (Crusoe as the natural master, Friday the
good slave) cannot accommodate the "feelings" emerging here.
Bishop's drafts suggest doubts about a hierarchical model of so-
ciety and a yearning for a model of reciprocity: "Just when I
couldn't stand my hegemony/hegemonic self a minute longer, Fri-
day came." (She had also used binary as an alternative to hege-
monic.) But it is within the colonial model, not from outside it,
that the yearning for reciprocity arises, hence the conflicts Merrill
observed in the language about Friday.
To call Bishop's poem a meditation on "her loss of Lota," as
Fountain does (265), is to ignore the social history roiling within
these lines. Friday, like Crusoe, belongs to history and to the
mythic pantheon history creates. The crucible of language has
transformed him many times over-as the natural servant, the
noble savage, the Winander Boy, Samuel Beckett's Lucky, Gal Fri-
day. Indeed, Friday has left the realm of myth and entered the
realm of idiom. Bishop indicates this when she remarks: "Just
when I couldn't stand it another minute longer, Friday came." Fri-
day (whether slave or weekend harbinger) promises release from
the alienating force of monotonous routine and lonely labor
("registering the flora and fauna"). By drawing on this historically
inflected myth the poem does not stand against the social reality
but rather enters into its dynamic, allowing the "re-seeing" to arise
as a cultural, not just a personal impulse. "Accounts of that have
everything all wrong" not because the past has lied and the truth
is personal, or because Bishop is presenting a radical counter-
ideology, but because language and meaning are historical and
social.
6. The Figure of Voice and the Sound of the Poem
When we identify the speaker of lyric we tend to forget the

figurative structure of voice. We convert an effect to a cause. We
need not abandon the activity of personification, which brings the
lyric speaker into a relation with our personal and social history,
in order to retain a sense of its fictional quality, and to distinguish
the lyric subject from the recuperated authorial origin of the lyric.
Unquestionably, late in her career Bishop established a more in-
timate, immediate voice for lyric, one that encourages this act of
personification. That this intimacy might be a matter less of per-
sonal disclosure than generic achievement is seldom acknowl-
edged.
Before Geography III Bishop's poems tended to feature im-
age over voice. The landscapes of Florida, Paris, New York, the
Maritimes, and other "illustrations" were highly particularized,
engaging the reader's mental observation, while the speaker
tended to be remote, even abstract or generalized. In "Crusoe in
England" we have the opposite case, a poem that refuses descrip-
tion and unsettles point of view, creating ritualized and allusive
landscapes, yet projects a distinctive, immediate voice. This is per-
haps why readers have been so tempted to anthropomorphize the

voice and absorb the author into it. But while Crusoe's voice is in-
dividuated, his identity is not unitary. He cannot be reduced to
a speaker whom the poem positions ironically or dramatically,
even though his voice is more distinctive than that of Prufrock or
Gerontion.
He is distinguishable from Defoe's monotoned Robinson
Crusoe by his constant shifts of register and diction. One hears a
steady rising and falling of the voice between expectation and
disappointment, and a rhythm less disjunctive and schematic than
Prufrock's swerves from climax. "A new volcano has erupted," be-
gins the poem, gathering aspiration with "born," "breath," "first,"
until a climactic "rose in the mate's binoculars" yields to "caught
on the horizon like a fly," and the stanza exhales tonally, gradually
declining with "but," and "un," until the culminating negation of
"none." We find a similar rhythm in the next stanza, where the
"overlapping rollers," bring constant promise of sublimity, but
"never quite" close in. Indeed, the emotional rhythms of the poem
produce an effect much like ocean waves, gathering force toward
a consummation that never comes. "Pretty to watch; he had a
pretty body. // And then one day they came and took us off." The
effect of such shifts of momentum is not simply ironic negation.
We hear instead, in linguistic conflict, an unsuppressible ideality
(marked in the French "Mont d'Espoir") contending with the per-
sistent denials of modern knowledge (in the English "Mount De-
spair"). The modern disillusion does not merely stifle the ideality;
it works dialectically, as Adorno suggested, toward some new dis-
position of language, and thus of society.
The same voice can speak of waterspouts as "sacerdotal be-
ings of glass" and yet lack any word for Friday but nice and pretty.
These shifts become signs for an inverted ratio of language to
feeling. The poem reminds us repeatedly that nature's voice is
occluded (the craters have "parched throats") or unintelligible
("baa... shriek. .,. baa"), and that we merely "play with names,"
and yet the poem creates a strong sense of the speaker's presence
and address to the reader. The markers of storytelling-"well, I
had... ," "Now," the ellipses, the dashes and exclamations--all
contour this figure of voice projecting itself out from the Silence of
Life, far more social than the shadowy "you" and prophetic "we"
of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." This is not primarily a
voice of meditation, even if the interrogatives circle back to their
source. The poem indeed contrasts a past voice of self-counsel
with the socially impelled voice of the present narration in which
it is embedded. The narrative markers and asides convey a perfor-

mative aspect, in which the reader becomes inscribed as a listener
in the figure of voice and a window opens out from solitude.
Historical displacements, like discontinuities of tense, create
another curious conflict in the figure of voice. The dramatic mono-
logue of the nineteenth century (Robert Browning, Alfred Ten-
nyson) often made use of historical figures, and past fictional
figures, to allow at once for the sympathy toward an inheritance
and a modern dissociation from the past. In Eliot, the technique
of simultaneity-the First World War veteran Stetson called to re-
member the ancient war at Mylae-evokes a transhistorical realm
of imagination and cultural memory. But the displacement here-
Crusoe trying to recite Wordsworth-tends to recall us to the fic-
tive nature of voice, and to the historical nature of the language
that creates voice.
In these and other ways, "Crusoe in England" remains true
to the central concern of the lyric-the self-while at the same
time becoming impersonal. Bishop was negatively capable, inhab-
iting more than one perspective, dramatizing questions rather
than projecting views. She resists the literary effects and entrap-
ments of self-regard, through a wide range of distancing strate-
gies: self-quotation, parentheses, distortions of cliche, etc. Narra-
tive in Bishop interrupts the cyclical flow of lyric self-absorption,
even in this relatively circular poem.' Crusoe is an unsuccessful
narcissist, and through the mask Bishop is able to achieve some
detachment from his self-absorption and to display its failings.
In the constant affronts to his narcissism we find him learning
ways to operate in a world that does not greet his eyes. Indeed, we
hear him almost break out of his narcissism in that last "dear Fri-
day." Other poems in Geography III ("The Moose," "The End of
March," "Poem"), which are rich in reality effects, recognize and
articulate a beauty that is not of the self, suggesting alternatives to
his narcissism, so that we do not simply feel that solipsism and
narcissism are inevitable conditions of consciousness, or that
these attributes of Crusoe are the essential Bishop. She dissociates
herself from the insistent "I" that rings so prominently in the
poem-eight times in eighteen lines of stanza two; eight times in
10 lines in stanza four--seeking to solace himself in self-pity by in-
habiting various subject positions ("me," "myself," "my"). The
poem does not rest there, does not make a home in self-pity. This
construction rests "over a crater's edge" and there is something lu-
dicrous, the poem indicates, about the "familiar legs" dangling
down with no ground (or leg) to stand on. They form an emblem
of ungrounded identity. "Crusoe in England" is not itself an exer-

cise in self-pity, but its opposite, a work of modesty, detachment
and humor. These impersonal effects move us in part, as in any art,
because we sense the immense personal, and artistic, effort in-
volved in achieving them. This is the heroic nature of the imper-
sonal, but Bishop conveys it in her remarkable handling of the
persona, not in the encoding of autobiographical detail.
While the poem is more voice than image, the voice conveys
us to a pattern of conflicting images that articulate more than Cru-
soe can know. "I wanted to propagate my kind," says Crusoe, and
Bishop's critics have been quick to point out her comment to
friends that she would like to have had a child (Millier 451). What
is less often observed is the pervasive and ambivalent language of
propagation (and a corollary language of violence, displaced can-
nibalism, and sterility) that runs throughout the poem. If we di-
rect our attention to the poetry, not the poet, we notice that the de-
sire to propagate comes right after a frightening dream of "Islands
spawning islands" ("my brain bred islands" he recalls later in the
poem). His desire to participate in the continuity of life must be set
against a view of life itself as involuntary, uncontrollable propa-
gation, inextricably bound to violence. Indeed, the first island is
"born" in the poem's opening lines and "breathes" steam, though
its source is volcanic eruption. Beside these images of fecundity
are images of sterile repetition and asexual reproduction. Where
difference does coincide the result is more often violence than
union. The problems of singularity and repetition that torment
Crusoe, of imposing violence where reciprocity is sought, may or
may not have their origin in Bishop's feelings about loneliness, or
about same-sex love (which Freud read as a form of narcissism, a
view Bishop would likely protest), but they extend into matters of
creativity, representation, consciousness, and experience that link
her to her tradition and to her readers.
The force of repetition and violently cancelled difference
constitutes one of this poem's deep rhythms. It makes a clear for-
mal mark on the poem-a kind of undersong or tone of mean-
ing-even when thematically ambiguous. Poetic form was not
only another means of distance and detachment from the entrap-
ments of the self, it was a social gesture, another means of com-
munication. The poem, though mostly unrhymed and only loosely
recalling pentameter from time to time, is riddled with same-word
end rhymes (epistrophe)-"giant/giant," "everythingleverything,"
"gull/gull," "islandlisland"-reinforced by internal echo ("baa,
baa, baa," "shriek, shriek, shriek," "bleat, bleat," "eye, iris, "home-
made, homemade," "nice, nice," "pretty, pretty." Bishop knows,
with Emily Dickinson, that "internal difference" is "where the
meanings are" and her soundtrack of Crusoe's consciousness

lacks these inflections. The occasional couplets (gray/display)
build no interesting play of opposition, but rather undermine the
minimal variety: "the beaches were all lava, variegated, / black,
red, and white, and gray; / the marbled colors made a fine display."
The "sea/me" rhyme might allow a dialectical flow, except for the
repetitions that surround it: "The sun set in the sea; the same odd
sun / rose from the sea / and there was one of it and one of me." The
sea is not a thing seen, then, but a mirror of loneliness. Even where
a line intervenes between the rhymes, the internal rhymes of the
line reinforce the sense of sterile repetition, or difference (as in
hope and despair) collapsing into sameness (d'espoir/despair/air):
One billy goat would stand on the volcano

I'd christened Mont d'Espoir or Mount Despair
(I'd time enough to play with names),
and bleat and bleat, and sniff the air.
The rhymes here reflect the theme. Crusoe wants to recognize in

the goat a fellowship in difference-an empathic connection be-
tween his own voiced yearnings and the bleats of the animal. But
the species remain isolated; difference collapses into repetition,
or malice, which subverts difference. We are left with a dialogue
of one, or two independent dialogues of one, nature's with its
"questioning shrieks, . . . equivocal replies," and Crusoe's with his
question-answer monologue: "Do I deserve this? I suppose I
must. I... Was there / a moment when I actually chose this? / I
don't remember, but there could have been." The poem glimpses
some redemptive difference. "Friday was nice. Friday was nice
and we were friends" is incremental, at least, in its repetition. But
what we never get in this poem is the lovely coupling of opposites
possible in rhyme (and present in other Bishop poems), suggest-
ing again representation's internal differences. One might choose
almost any rhyme from "The Moose" with its marvelous mingling
of the human and the natural:
past clapboard farmhouses

and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches[.]
The comparative redundancy of rhyme in "Crusoe in England"

has to do with all the singularities of the world reproducing their
kind in an asexual spawning that involves no "love" between dif-
ferent kinds. The fear that poetry may be just this sort of spawn-
ing simulacra, repetitions of the self, propagation of the merely

personal rather than engagement with the world in its otherness,
haunts the poem. Friday's tactile communion with nature ("he'd
pet the baby goats, and carry one around") recalls a model of en-
gagement lively throughout Bishop's work. We might recall how
in "The Map" "these peninsulas take the water between thumb
and finger / like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods."
Crusoe remains a spectator, for he destroys what he touches. Yet
in creating the figure of Crusoe, so wonderfully particularized in
his fictive world, markedly distanced from Bishop, yet sympa-
thetic as the voice of life's great puzzles and troubles, the poet has
succeeded where Crusoe fails. She has broken her lyric isolation (a
generic, not a personal condition) and she has found a way to
"propagate her kind" without mere repetition of the self and with-
out a narrow autobiographical purpose.
Sound creates voice not only through the rhymes of this
poem, but also through its consonants. Crusoe's tonal range, the
shifting expression on the face of the words, can be heard partic-
ularly in his penchant for grousing "b" sounds-"being born,"
"breath," "black," "basalt," "binoculars," "books" all in the first
stanza-vacillating with mock-alliterative, tongue-twisting "s"
sounds-"The sun set in the sea: the same odd sun / rose from the
sea," "sooty, scrub affair," "snail shells," "slithery strides." Within
this "Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek," of the poem's sound-
track Bishop creates a lyricality which is not general, but specific
to the figure of voice.
Susan Stewart is one of the few critics to pay more than pass-
ing attention to the expressive power of Bishop's prosody. Her es-
say "Lyric Possession" calls our attention to the somatic meaning
of poetic music and meter. Such a meaning is not intentional in
Wimsatt's sense of "mastering an original poetic will" but on the
contrary, it haunts the poet's explicit utterance (Stewart 37). Stew-
art draws together classical models of poetic genius (possession
by the muse) and psychoanalytic models of "transgenerational
haunting and the permeability of the voice and person" to de-
scribe a tension or at least a distinction between "propositional
and what might be called somatic utterance" (43). But even here
Stewart moves to possess the poet psychologically. The "perme-
ability" of voice and person extends only to the writer's personal
past. From the powerful reminder of "the way poetry involves be-
ing spoken through as well as speaking" (38), its way of being
"haunted by others" (52), she moves not toward a social or dia-
logical understanding of the unconscious of poetry, but toward
the recovery of the personal. "The choice of ballad form enables
Keats to re-enact the betrayal of his brother Tom [by a hoax per-
petrated by George Wills]" (44). Stewart draws out striking ex-
amples of Bishop's allusion to nursery rhyme, but in the end, in
"At the Fishhouses," for instance, this somatic meaning simply
"reawakens a tragic childhood" (44). "The [poem's] move from the
most abstract senses of sound and sight to the immediate physi-
cality of touch and taste is a historical journey to the sources of
Bishop's early loss of her father and mother" (61). But in "At the
Fishhouses" that loss is explicit from the outset (from the substi-
tution of grandfather for parents); it hardly needs a somatic mean-
ing to bring it out. For the poet living in New York or Florida
but writing about the Maritimes, this childhood has long since
been reawakened and brought into the prepositional realm of
language. The point is not to be in touch with the past but to open
it to transpersonal discourse. The rudimentary, prebourgeois
rhythms of nursery rhymes and hymns, as Adorno pointed out (64),
give the poet access to a holistic community residing within lan-
guage. Stewart misses an opportunity to read lyric possession in
this way, as ultimately impersonal. For while she recognizes that
form can represent the "transport or waylaying of subjective in-
tention" she ultimately does so, as Yopi Prins has pointed out,
"with reference to a model of the unconscious that still assumes
an individual consciousness" (155).
Bishop's disavowal of autobiography would seem most
clearly belied by the end of the poem, where Crusoe looks with de-
tachment at the relics of his island life. The museum may be an ex-
pression of modernity's desire to collapse time and space and to
replace experience with objects that represent it. These things
have no aura for Crusoe. The ego connection to them has burned
off. The images clearly also form a figure of the writing life, and
the relationship of the poet to her poetic materials and products.
Universities and libraries, as Harrison has documented in detail,
had approached Bishop about manuscripts and letters for their
archives (121). But what seems most important is how this serves
as the autobiography of all creative effort, not just Bishop's. The
last two stanzas of "Crusoe in England" involve a final intersec-
tion of the personal and the impersonal. The creative urge, the
poem tells us, is born of desperate need; the word becomes flesh as
if to redeem the user:
The knife there on the shelf-

it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.
It lived. How many years did I
beg it, implore it, not to break?
The knife can easily be translated to a writing implement

with its "broken tip" whose "living soul," like ink, has "dribbled
away." But if we follow the logic of this image we might also con-
clude that the abandonment of personal connection does not ren-
der the object useless. A cultural transfer is taking place, not just
of the apparatus of art, but of art itself, in the form of the parasol,
that shield against weather. And the scene itself, of the poet disso-
ciated from the remnants of his creative process, is a topos. Wal-
lace Stevens depicted himself as "The Man on the Dump" for
whom even the dew has grown stale. Yeats complained of his
"Circus Animals' Desertion," but returned to "the foul rag and
bone shop of the heart" by way of a return to ottava rima. "Sur-
rounded by uninteresting lumber"-of comfortable First World
furnishing-and with "real tea" on hand, the imaginative and vi-
tal energy required to "make do in a pinch" has "petered out" for
Crusoe. If he resembles the poet in a dry period, he recalls too
Tennyson's Ulysses, bored by the comforts of domestic life, recall-
ing the intensity of his quest for home. Crusoe seems particularly
dissociated from the remnants of his past, the personal effects,
which so fascinate the public: "How can anyone want such
things?" At the same time these items are metaphors for poetry-
nature poetry in particular, since flute and goat suggest the Pan of
pastoral, just as the parasol, "like a plucked and skinny fowl," re-
calls the bird of lyric stripped bare to reveal its artifice.
If the poet's disaffection from the relics of her career was a
spur to this passage, the recent cultural past, at least, provided
plenty of reinforcement. The object of postmodernity has lost its
aura, and sits in the museum emptied of a past it fails to conjure
through nostalgia. What consolation or access do such relics pro-
vide to the personal, really? The unspeakable loss of Friday,
meanwhile, is marked with the calendar precision of Defoe's Cru-
soe, and with his dates in mind. Has Bishop masked her losses in
the figure of Crusoe, or has she used her losses as an emotional
material that contributes to the "re-seeing" of the archetype, in-
troducing into the myth of desire and mastery the inevitable nar-
rative of disillusionment and loss? And now that narrative too is
part of the collective substratum of our language.
What animates these poems is not their biographical origins,
nor a solitary stance against Western tradition, but the prospec-
tive intimacy the poet has created within the impersonal frame of
art. The ending speaks not of Bishop and Lota (however they may
factor in its creative origins), but of modern man, bored by the im-
mediate fulfillment of his material wants, unconsoled by his habits
of preservation, unable to overcome personal loss, transfigure it in
song, or live in memory. This figure does not emerge from Bishop's
singular antagonism toward the past but from her profound en-
gagement with its contending aspirations and mutating myths.
Jeffrey Perl may be correct that "inversion, travesty and obsessive
negative allusion seem indispensable to nonhumanist aesthetics"
(17). But Bishop's "Crusoe in England" has a more complicated
relation to the past; she recognizes that the antagonisms emerge
from within rather than against the humanist tradition. The com-
pelling personal voice of the impersonal Crusoe makes this poem
unforgettable, "live in detail," not a noman's voice of Everyman.
Impersonal craft conveys it: full of sentence sounds, bent across
an inimitable music, rich in alliteration, modulating in and out of
blank verse and free verse, rhyming and unrhyming, ranging from
primer verse to swan song, now intoning, now jaded. The rhythm
of long sentences against short, the parentheses, dashes, ellipses,
all these impersonal devices (largely ignored by critics) give a per-
sonal inflection to the speaker, create an effect of immediate voice.
But while Bishop's Crusoe gives the sense of the particular within
the generality of language, he also gives voice to contradictory,
historical impulses that his particularity does not resolve. His re-
flection, his boredom, his self-irony, his knowledge and doubt, his
moments of passion in love, loss, or fear, are not Bishop's or De-
foe's, but ours.
Notes
1. This is hardly a new point, having been made first in my essay "The Imper-
sonal and the Interrogative in Elizabeth Bishop" and again by Edelman.
2. I would like to thank my student Eoin Cannon for drawing my attention to

this passage in McCabe's book, in his excellent paper on Bishop's A Cold Spring.
3. Lombardi misreads Kermode, whose argument is in many ways the reverse

of hers. The "secrecy" is not a diversion from carnal meaning to keep the un-
initiated out; rather, the carnal meaning is the diversion, the latent meaning only
hinted to the initiate through the diversions from the carnal meaning. For an al-
ternative application of Kermode's thesis to Bishop's poetry, see my article "Nar-
rative Secrets."
4. Valerie Rohy, influenced by her thesis advisor, Edelman, has provided a more
rhetorical reading of Bishop within a gay-studies framework. In her analysis, les-
bian sexuality in Bishop must be understood as itself operating "within language
and linguistic displacements" (119) and embedded in structures of symboliza-
tion rather than with reference to "the place of the unrepresentable real" (Jar-
raway, qtd. in Rohy 121). But again, art circles back to biography. "Gwendolyn"
for Rohy becomes a narrative by which Bishop comes to terms with her lesbian
identity as a form of metaphoric substitution for the lost mother.
5. Jerredith Merrin's article is typical and proceeds with exactly the same logic
as Jarraway employs: "I suggest that Bishop's gaiety or delight in the possibilities
of change is in turn inextricable from her gayness: her questioning of gender
boundaries, for example, and the exploration (however oblique and shrouded) of
the pleasures and anxieties of same-sex love" (154). "Inextricable" in what way
she does not make clear. Is the link motivational? Causal? Referential? Are all
Bishop's references to mutability (the central topos of the lyric tradition) trace-
able to her sexual preference? How we understand the link has profound impli-
cations for how we read the poems.
6. "The Monument," which Vernon Shetley has also associated with "Tradi-
tion and the Individual Talent" (41), again directs us away from the Romantic
model of creativity. "The bones of the artist-prince may be inside / or far away
on even drier soil" (Complete Poems 24). The poem suggests that we think of sub-
jectivity not in terms of origin (or biographical past), but in terms of parable, the
perpetual future of trope: "[W]atch it closely" (24).
7. Bishop noted as early as 1934 that "On an island one lives all the time in a
Robinson Crusoe atmosphere ... A poem should be made about making things
in a pinch-& how it looks sad when the emergency is over" (Notebook). There
is of course a lot more in the poem she did write, but this outline, which predates
Lota and Brazil by 20 years, suggests the poem is not reducible to late biograph-
ical impulses. Bishop writes to Lowell in 1964 "that she had been up late work-
ing on a poem about Crusoe." (qtd. in Millier 446). Two pages of that effort, es-
sentially the first two pages of the poem, called "Crusoe at Home" with "(in
Hull?)" written below, can be found in the Houghton Library.
8. See Rich, "The Eye of the Beholder: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop." Jar-
raway seems unaware of this essay, though it anticipates his argument.
9. One wonders, too, whether Bishop knew Hardy's "In a Waiting Room,"
which takes place in a train station. The text the speaker encounters there is the
Bible, and it prompts his move through several stages in thinking about his con-
nection to others.
10. Louise Glfick makes these points about Berryman (Gliick 45).
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(1974): 56-72. cial Collections.
Bishop, Elizabeth. The Collected . Letters to James Merrill. Vas-

Prose. New York: Farrar, 1984. sar College Library Special Collec-
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. The Complete Poems, 1927-

1979. New York: Farrar, 1986. - . Notebook from Cutyhunk,
Maine. Jul. 1934. Papers. Vassar Col-
. "Dimensions for a Novel"' lege Library Special Collections.
Vassar Journal of Undergraduate Stud-
ies 8 (May 1934): 95-103. -- . Poetry Notebook, 1964, 1965.
Ms. Am 2115. Houghton Library, Bishop: The Geography of Gender.

Harvard University. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993.
. One Art: Selected Letters. Ed. Flynn, Carol Houlihan. "Consump-

Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, tive Fictions: Cannibalism and De-
1994. foe.' Robinson Crusoe. A Norton Crit-
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Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Politics and York: Norton, 1994. 423-32.
Form in Postmodern Poetry. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Fountain, Gary and Peter Brazeau.
Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography.
Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught. "Eliza- Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994.
beth Bishop: Perversity as Voice."
Lombardi. 175-95. Glfick, Louise. Proofs & Theories.
New York: Ecco, 1994.
Cory, Chris, and Alwyn Lee. "Poets:
The Second Chance." Time 89.2 (2 Goldensohn, Lorrie. Elizabeth Bishop:
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Columbia UP, 1991.
Costello, Bonnie. "The Impersonal
and the Interrogative in the Poetry of Hahn, Susan. "Authenticity and Im-
Elizabeth Bishop." Elizabeth Bishop personality in Adorno's Aesthetics."
and Her Art. Ann Arbor: U of Michi- Telos 117 (1999): 60-79.
gan P, 1983. 109-32.
Hammer, Langdon. "The New Eliza-
. "Narrative Secrets, Lyric beth Bishop." The Yale Review 82:
Openings: Wallace Stevens and Eliza- 135-49.
beth Bishop." The Wallace Stevens
Journal 19 (1995): 180-201. Harrison, Victoria. Elizabeth Bishop's
Poetics of Intimacy. New York: Cam-
Defoe, Daniel. Serious Reflections dur- bridge UP, 1993.
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of Robinson Crusoe. (1720). 1-4. Rpt. Jarraway, David. "O Canada!": The
in Robinson Crusoe: A Norton Critical Spectral Lesbian Poetics of Elizabeth
Edition. Second Edition. New York: Bishop." PMLA 113 (1998): 243-57.
Norton, 1994. 243-45.
Keats, John. Selected Poems and Let-
Diehl, Joanne Feit. "Bishop's Sexual ters. Ed. Douglas Bush. Boston:
Poetics." Lombardi. 17-45. Houghton, 1959.
Edelman, Lee. "The Geography of Langbaum, Robert. The Poetry of Ex-

Gender: Elizabeth Bishop's 'In the
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ature 26.2 (1985): 179-96. U of Chicago P, 1957.
Lombardi, Marilyn May. The Body

Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and
Plays. New York: Harcourt, 1962. and the Song. Elizabeth Bishop's
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. "Tradition and the Individual
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After Modernism. New York: Oxford Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
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McCabe, Susan. Elizabeth Bishop: Schwartz, Lloyd, and Sybil P. Estess,

Her Poetics of Loss. University Park: ed. Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Ann
Penn State UP, 1994. Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983.
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Bishop. Vassar College Library Spe- etry: Poet and Audience in Contempo-
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1993.
Merrin, Jeredith. "Elizabeth Bishop:
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Millier, Brett. Elizabeth Bishop: Life
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Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000.

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Elizabeth Bishop's Impersonal Personal

Author(s): Bonnie Costello

This article confronts the persistent argument that Elizabeth

1. Who Speaks for Bishop?

"You wish they'd keep some of these things to themselves,"

? 2003 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY

ship to "the Western tradition" rather than emphasizing the many

Cabe's Elizabeth Bishop.: Her Poetics of Loss begins by insisting

secret recesses, therefore demands of its readers a special herme-

then account for a broad range of Bishop's images and strategies

It is that provisional, precarious nature of self-representation

There is an obvious sense, of course, in which these critics are

2. Tradition and the Individual Talent

Bishop's version of the impersonal quoted above takes Dar-

of this idea. He argues that the poet's intense engagement with

the larger contradictory wholeness of language, so that the history

Ian Watt long ago identified the story of Robinson Crusoe as

soe in England," Millier remarks, is "as close as [Bishop] gets to

traordinary emotional, moral, or historical positions to which the

We adopt a man's point of view and the point of view of his

One of the things that distinguishes the modern dramatic mono-

myths, in which our names do not appear" (22). On one hand,

myths are residual in the unnamed representations of Bishop's

not green & dripping, dressed in full-grown trees

Wordsworth not only extolled the beauty of nature; he ex-

In calling herself a "minor female Wordsworth," critics sug-

from Defoe, who recognized the tragic isolation inherent in his

distinguish solitude from loneliness. "O Solitude! if I must with

The question of who Crusoe is cannot be separated, of

the Other. Bishop was rereading Conrad while in Brazil. Indeed,

poem's language makes it clear that these tensions are embedded

The most abstract, generalizing, and depersonalized words

6. The Figure of Voice and the Sound of the Poem

When we identify the speaker of lyric we tend to forget the

haps why readers have been so tempted to anthropomorphize the

it is embedded. The narrative markers and asides convey a perfor-

of ungrounded identity. "Crusoe in England" is not itself an exer-

meanings are" and her soundtrack of Crusoe's consciousness

One billy goat would stand on the volcano

The rhymes here reflect the theme. Crusoe wants to recognize in

past clapboard farmhouses

The comparative redundancy of rhyme in "Crusoe in England"

ing simulacra, repetitions of the self, propagation of the merely

The knife there on the shelf-

The knife can easily be translated to a writing implement

2. I would like to thank my student Eoin Cannon for drawing my attention to

3. Lombardi misreads Kermode, whose argument is in many ways the reverse

Adorno, Theodor. "Lyric Poetry and . Letters to Anne Stevenson.

Bishop, Elizabeth. The Collected . Letters to James Merrill. Vas-

. The Complete Poems, 1927-

Ms. Am 2115. Houghton Library, Bishop: The Geography of Gender.

. One Art: Selected Letters. Ed. Flynn, Carol Houlihan. "Consump-

Edelman, Lee. "The Geography of Langbaum, Robert. The Poetry of Ex-

Lombardi, Marilyn May. The Body

Longenbach, James. Modern Poetry Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of

McCabe, Susan. Elizabeth Bishop: Schwartz, Lloyd, and Sybil P. Estess,

Rohy, Valerie. Impossible Women.

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