Bridget Read on Elizabeth Bishop's 'Powerful Reticence'

Bridget Read delves into a new biography of the great modernist poet, Elizabeth Bishop, in the pages of the New Republic. The biography in question, Megan Marshall's Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, is, according to Read, "an attempt to connect more fully than ever Bishop’s poetics with the facts of her personal life—a synthesis of life and work that becomes a beguiling prospect when its subject is the famously private Bishop." Let's pick up with Read's review from there:

Though readers, critics, and especially biographers have long romanticized the discovery of caches of personal effects in the homes of writers, the ins-and-outs of their unearthing are decidedly unglamorous. They can verge on intrusive, tasteless, and even criminal in some cases. When Italian journalist Claudio Gatti revealed the identity of novelist Elena Ferrante in 2016, incensed fans wrote of Ferrante’s anonymity as a feminist act of resistance against the state of modern authorship, in which the writer is increasingly asked to reveal herself: physically, with an author photo, as well as biographically, in pages and pages of “behind the book” pieces, personal essays, appearances, panels, and social media accounts. For a poet like Bishop, whose work was so often predicated upon withholding, these demands can seem particularly violating—not least because they are made most passionately and persistently of authors who are women.

Bishop’s body of work is notoriously compact. She published only 100 poems in her lifetime. Octavio Paz said of Bishop that her poetry is a lesson in “the enormous power of reticence.” She won a Pulitzer Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a National Book Award for poems that were modern in style but removed in register, as devoid of biographical detail as they are short in word count. “Something needn’t be large to be good” is how her mentor and friend Marianne Moore described the Bishop aesthetic. Bishop herself called it her “Scotch-Canadian-Protestant-Puritan” temperament.

Read on at New Republic.