Elizabeth Bishop, Isolation, and the Real World

It has been productive to begin reading Bishop's short stories because they help emphasize aspects of her poetry. Specifically, stories like "The Sea & Its Shore" and "In Prison" stress the importance of isolation that is slightly less apparent in the poetry. There's a strong resonance between "The Sea & Its Shore" and the late poem "The End of March."

I find this connection between early and late work important because it seems the critical perspective, initiated by Thomas Travisano in his "Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development," looks at so much of the middle and late work as a blossoming in which the "real world" makes an appearance. But I am struck by the similarities, the consistency of Bishop's vision. From Travisano's perspective, the early work is evidence of Bishop's interest in and fascination with enclosure. Bishop constructs self-imposed prisons in which characters are isolated and the world is only considered as an abstract thing. This abstraction is a form of escape. Travisano argues that Bishop's development leads her out of these enclosures in order to integrated the world. Aspects of her travels and real life are slowly integrated into her poetry and she more fully engages with the world.

I'm not so convinced. The late poem "The End of March" tells of a walk along a beach and the speaker's desire to "get as far as my proto-dream-house, / my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box / set up on pilings, shingled green." This "box" resembles the house in which the protagonist of "The Sea & Its Shore" lives. In both cases, the structure seems to offer only shelter, striping away all excesses and providing only an escape from the elements. In other words, it separates one from the world without recreating its own world. (There's probably a comment on American consumerism here, too, but I don't know where to take that yet). In both texts, the protagonist reads (or hopes to read) things that don't contain an avenue toward meaning; in the story they are scraps of paper and in the poem they are "boring books, / old, long, long books." The texts do not coordinate the facts of the world; there is no hope that one can discover some ultimate meaning from them.

The sense of enclosure that Travisano identifies in the early work is still present in the later work, and I believe appears throughout. The material of the world is definitely more present in some of the later poems, but the intent to block it all out or diffuse its variety still appears to be an important force in her work.