preview

Elizabeth Bishop Research Paper

Good Essays

Elizabeth Bishop was a remarkable poet; she contributed to the experiment of the 20th century where poets experimented with nontraditional forms and intricate verse. She wrote exactly 100 poems, dealing with diverse topics such as death, wanderlust, and alcoholism. She also broke the classic structure of 19th-century poetry to emphasize the style of the Modern Era. Bishop rose to prominence after she published her first collection of poetry, North and South, and published her first novel, along with eighteen new poems in Poems: North and South - A Cold Spring, nine years later. Past and present critics praise Bishop for her detailed imagery, and her influence in the poetry remains clear to this day.
As a young girl, Bishop had a dark childhood, filled with death. Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, …show more content…

However, Elizabeth Bishop is undeniably a post-modern poet. Postmodernism began in the late 30s.Some notable characteristics of poetry written during the Postmodernist period include an objective point of view, an ironic look on life's tragedies and hyperreality. One of the many aspects of PostModernism present in Bishop’s poetry is that of an impersonal narrator. To be more specific, poetry was told from an objective point of view. For Bishop, an impersonal narrator allowed Bishop to to write poetry about situations she's been in without revealing her personal life. Blah says “Bishop enters the consciousness of characters lost in a world bigger than themselves or their ideas and lets them speak out of their limitations.” The use of the distanced narrator is evident in “Sestina”: “In the failing light, the old grandmother /sits in the kitchen with the child/beside the Little Marvel Stove…” (2-5). As __ says in “The Impersonal and the Interrogative in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop”, writing from an objective point of view puts human confusion and loss, as well as human authority, “in

Get Access