Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Great Regulars: Thinking of Elizabeth Bishop as "elliptical"

may be a stretch for contemporary readers, but the early years of back-and-forth between White and Bishop reveal how carefully Bishop had to guard against the magazine's style infiltrating her verse. Although [Katherine] White found Bishop's poem "Cape Breton" "a perfect portrait of a countryside, a wonderfully exact description of that kind of seacoast and a most distinguished poem as well," she did have questions over a pronoun in the final stanza. "Just what is your meaning here?" she asked of a recalcitrant "their." "Do you mean that the interior regions have little to say for themselves except in the songs of birds and except for the fact that on this Sunday you describe so exactly the fisherman who live in the little houses of the back country are mending their torn fish-nets?"

from Powells: Review-A-Day: Pieces Falling into Place

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