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Wallace Stevens once described the \"malady of the quotidian,\" lamenting the dull weight of everyday regimen. Yet he would later hail \"that which is always beginning, over and over\"-recognizing, if not celebrating, the possibility of fresh invention. Focusing on the poems of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill, Siobhan Phillips positions everyday time as a vital category in modernist aesthetics, American literature, and poetic theory. She eloquently reveals how, through particular but related means, each of these poets converts the necessity of quotidian experience into an aesthetic and experiential opportunity. In Stevens, Phillips analyzes the implications of cyclic dualism. In Frost, she explains the theoretical depth of a habitual \"middle way.\" In Bishop's work, she identifies the attempt to turn recurrent mornings into a \"ceremony\" rather than a sentence, and in Merrill, she shows how cosmic theories rely on daily habits. Phillips ultimately demonstrates that a poetics of everyday time contributes not only to a richer understanding of these four writers but also to descriptions of their era, estimations of their genre, and ongoing reconfigurations of the issues that literature reflects and illuminates.

Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Description argues that attention to the material realm informs everything Bishop does. Seen through this lens, many familiar topics look remarkably different. Bishop's relationship to travel, epiphany, surrealism, and imagery are all transformed, and a timely new Bishop emerges - one quite different from the postmodern poet that has dominated recent scholarship.

Elizabeth Bishop is now recognized as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century—a uniquely cosmopolitan writer with connections to the US, Canada, Brazil, and also the UK, given her neglected borrowings from many English authors, and her strong influence on modern British verse. Yet the dominant biographical/psychoanalytical approach leaves her style relatively untouched—and it is vital that an increasing focus on archival material does not replace our attention to the writing itself. Bishop's verse is often compared with prose (sometimes insultingly); writing fiction, she worried she was really writing poems. But what truly is the difference between poetry and prose—structurally, conceptually, historically speaking? Is prose simply formalized speech, or does it have rhythms of its own? Ravinthiran seeks an answer to this question through close analysis of Bishop's prose-like verse, her literary prose, her prose poems, and her letter prose. This title is a provocation. It demands that we reconsider the pejorative quality of the word prosaic; playing on mosaic, Ravinthiran uses Bishop's thinking about prose to approach—for the first time—her work in multiple genres as a stylistic whole. Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic is concerned not only with her inimitable style, but also larger questions to do with the Anglo-American shift from closed to open forms in the twentieth century. This study identifies not just borrowings from, but rich intertextual relationships with, writers as diverse as—among others—Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, and Dorothy Richardson. (Though Bishop criticized Woolf, she in particular is treated as a central and thus far neglected precursor, crucial to our understanding of Bishop as a feminist poet.) Finally, the sustained discussion of how the history of prose frames effects of rhythm, syntax, and acoustic texture—in both Bishop's prose proper and her prosaic verse—extends a body of research which seeks now to treat literature as a form of cognition. Technique and thought are finely wedded in Bishop's work—her literary forms evince a historical intelligence attuned to questions of power, nationality, tradition (both literary and otherwise), race, and gender.

Loneliness can wear many affective guises from withdrawal to creativity. This essay reads Elizabeth Bishop's negotiation of the intimate relationship between poetry and loneliness through the lens of British object relations psychoanalysis. Reading Bishop alongside the British school of psychoanalysis firstly illuminates the relationship between poetry and states of solitude; and helps to uncover the ways in which loneliness is recovered in the postwar period from its more dangerous state: isolation. This essay proposes a theory of reading poetry where the refusal of the solipsistic lyric transforms isolated subjects into communities of the lonely.

Lisa Goldfarb's Unexpected Affinities: Modern American Poetry and Symbolist Poetics adopts the rare one-to-many mode of poetic influence studies: it sets up a symbolist theory as the prism through which later modernistic poetic lights can pass and cross each other unexpectedly, converging while diverging. Through the central metaphor of Paul Valéry's pendulum of sound and sense, Goldfarb attempts to account for how the works of Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop have traveled back and forth between abstract thought and sensual impressions, creating a modern poetic music that is derived from modulations and variations rather than conventional metrical patterns.

This critical reassessment of Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” (1947) focuses specifically on the poem’s interweaving of fire and water imagery with questions of history and selfhood, and engages works by Feuerbach, Emerson, Bachelard, and Blanchot alongside Bishop’s drafts and other key materials held in the Vassar College archive.

This article contends that a mode of poetry that is not necessarily dialectical in its form, but “smooth”—and descriptive rather than normative—can nonetheless mount a critical aesthetics. I will show how Bishop, in “Poem” and more widely throughout her writing, offers a kind of aspect vision on the dynamics of globalization and money. “Poem” does this through the attention it pays to the material dimensions of a valueless painting. “Poem” is structured through the return, at many lines’ distance, of the notation of the painting as “[a]bout the size of an old-style dollar bill” (line 1), in the parallel, culminating line “[a]bout the size of our abidance” in the world (line 60). How, Bishop invites us to ask, do the material dimensions of a small painting and a large banknote figure the qualitative “size” of “our” creaturely “abidance”? Despite Felstiner’s helpful publication of this picture as the main source for “Poem,” I argue that what is so omnipresent but oblique about this work’s handling of reference remains open to analysis from literary and economic theory.

The villanelle enjoyed what the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics calls a golden age during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when leading poets from Dylan Thomas to Elizabeth Bishop \"ensured the villanelle's survival and status in English poetry\" (Kane and French 1522) Thomas's \"Do not go gentle into that good night,\" published in the literary magazine Botteghe Oscure in 1951 and a year later in his Country Sleep and Other Poems, will serve here as a reference point for a comparative study of three golden age villanelles by American poets: \"Containment,\" with its associations of constraint, restraint, and control, has become a catchword for a period in American culture coterminous with the villanelle's golden age, thanks in the first instance to Alan Nadel's Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (1995), which evokes George F. Kennan's Cold War advocacy of a \"containment\" foreign policy toward the Soviet Union.4 Golden age villanelles have their own \"containment\" policy and also ally themselves with the New Criticism's approach to a poem as a well-wrought urn, thereby shunning the prominence that confessionalism gave to the poet's ill-wrought psyche. The function of the foil is to introduce and highlight the climatic term by enumerating or summarizing a number of other instances that then yield (with varying degrees of contrast or analogy) to the particular point of interest or importance\" (1107).5 In Thomas's villanelle the tercets deliver instances of kinds of men who \"do not go gentle into that good night\" - wise men, good men, wild men, and grave men - which leads in the quatrain to the poem's real subject and occasion, \"And you, my father\" and his dying. A villanelle's division into five tercets and a quatrain makes it an ideal vehicle for a priamel, as Bishop's \"One Art\" also demonstrates. [...]the poet's prayer \"Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears,\" which sonically brings to mind Donne's praise of fetters in metrical verse: \"Griefe brought to numbers cannot be so fierce / For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse\" (12).