Elizabeth Bishop is the most disruptive and mysterious of modern poets. Disruptive because no one expected a poet of such cool and desolate intelligence to upset the apple cart of 20th-century poetry. Mysterious because it’s still not clear how this happened. How someone who, in James Merrill’s words, undertook the “lifelong impersonation of an ordinary woman” could have dazzled and subverted the modernist canon.
But she did; and still does. In her extraordinary late poems Bishop was not only a defining poet; she was also a radical one. Poems like One Art and The Moose have an eerie double effect. They draw the reader into revelation, but always with a throwaway, conversational tone. This eerie alloy of dark music coupled with a deceptive vernacular was Bishop’s signature achievement. Through it she unsettled the elevated stance of the modernist poet, which plainly irritated her. Through it she kept the poetic self to scale. When Robert Lowell published Life Studies, in 1959, fusing grand relatives with lyric disclosures, she wrote him a letter, her words iced with irony: “I feel I could write in as much detail about my Uncle Artie, say – but what would be the significance? Nothing at all.”
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