Extimacy in Elizabeth Bishop's Poetry
Résumé
What makes Elizabeth Bishop a great poet, and not just another merely mimetic lyrical poetestress or belated "female Wordsworth", is hat Robert Lowell once pinpointed as "something in motion". It is the same thing as what Bishop herself later called "baroque" poetry, defned as that "hich strove for action within the poem". For her as for Williams the objectivist, a poem is a machine with an intrinsic movement. For all her mixed feeling about Pound, for all her Audenesque poetic journalism and Mooresque diarism, her poetry by an essentially modernist, practically Vorticist fascination for the non-representational dimension of art. Her poetic signature resides in a literally aesthetic, cosmetic, often erotic enjoyment of the immediacy of the world.