“Rather have the iceberg than the ship”: Poet Elizabeth Bishop Sets Sail

Her cold waters are a welcomed respite from the fires of poetry

Elizabeth Bishop, 1934 Yearbook Photo

I am currently making my way through a Library of America book featuring an extensive collection of poet Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, prose, and correspondence with fellow wordsmiths like revered poet and translator Robert Lowell. It’s a wonderful reading experience because it presents the facts of her work, not interpretations by someone who came after her attempting to publicize one of the literary world’s most private figures.

Though I’ve been in love with her work since college, because she was such a private individual I’ve steered clear of researching her too much out of respect for wishes I know she’d want. However, one poem in particular, “The Colder The Air,” caused me to finally look a bit more into Miss Bishop the poet, rather than her poetry alone.

Due to her privacy within a world hellbent on making every existence a public one, many sources you can find about her are written with a tone that suggests annoyance with her inconspicuous qualities. New journalism writer Joan Didion went through the same thing. In the introduction to her book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she makes it clear her ability to chameleon herself works in her favor as a writer who values objectivity:

“What else is there to tell? I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have to talk to anyone’s press agent. (This precludes doing pieces on most actors, a bonus in itself.) I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does.”

Contemporary writers and artists should make note of this self-professed pattern among these women. It would do the literary world some good to have artists who wish to be chameleons rather than peacocks.

The best artists are the ones whose works are more famous than their biographies.

The Art of Privacy

One critique of Bishop’s work in particular surprised me. It was written by contemporary, confessionalist poet Adrienne Rich. I leapt at the chance to read her Boston Review article from 1984, “The Eye of the Outsider,” not only because Rich’s poems like “Diving into the Wreck” and her essay regarding the "search for mother” were some of my favorite works discovered in high school, but because Rich is one of the few who actually spent a bit of time with the traveling Bishop.

Much like Didion’s work, or Bishop herself, I expected Rich to approach the piece with clarity and precision. Some of the essay is indeed enlightening, but other parts paint Bishop in a light she specifically requested to be kept in the shadows from.

Rich was a lesbian who made, at the time of the ‘60s and ‘70s, her marginal lifestyle a core part of her work. She did so in grand, unapologetic, individualized fashion. So while I myself am heterosexual, I could appreciate her work because she challenged unnecessary and illogical customs and lived a life few at the time were brave enough to do.

However, within her piece on Bishop, she attempts to bring the poet into the same artistic motives as her own. It is documented that the two held opposing philosophical viewpoints on politics and sexuality and how those should play a role in art. While Rich wanted sexuality, race, and politics to be at the core of art, Bishop sought to, in a rather Naturalistic way, delve into the natural world while blending it with the personal—and creating enough universality so that each reader could draw something uniquely personal from her poetry.

For example, though Bishop was offered spots in poetry anthologies and collections featuring “Women Poets,” she refused publication because though she was considered to be a feminist, she was of the old-school variety. She wanted her work to be celebrated for its merit, not her gender.

Poetry International explains:

“Bishop identified as a feminist, but not as a feminist poet, and wanted her writing to be judged for its own merit rather than on her gender or sexuality. Dozens of poets cite her work as a major influence for its precision, description, and its exquisite reflection of the minutiae of everyday life.”

Rich appears to take issue with this in her article. Something felt off to me about it before I dove further into my research. The only conversation Rich ever had with Bishop that could be considered intimate was during a long drive where the two connected over shared experiences of losing loved ones to suicide. 

Rich’s use of a collective “white women” term set against an individualistic “Black women” term while also capitalizing “Black” and leaving “white” lowercase gave me pause as well.

Throughout the piece, Rich seems to be negative of Bishop because after their intimate conversation, Bishop didn’t need to further trauma-bond. She also appears to take issue with Bishop's independence and emotional distance. And she took issue with Bishop’s poetry not evolving, or in my opinion, devolving, into political fodder. 

The art of privacy is a lost one, and Bishop, like any artist worth a damn, didn’t care much that the art she was practicing, both personally and professionally, was a dying one. Even if Bishop was alive today (she passed on in 1979), I doubt she’d take to Instagram to read her poetry while filming a Reel.

“Well-meaning idiots with access to printing presses”

Dana Gioia’s memoir, Studying with Miss Bishop, offers a much more illuminating take on the twentieth century poet. I appreciate Rich for taking the time to commemorate Bishop, however I was looking for something more fact-based than interpretive during my research. After reading Rich's piece, I realized I had already found that months before with Gioia’s book, which I read last year.

Like a select lucky few students, though Bishop, ever the unassuming artist, would never call them lucky, he spent some time studying under her tutelage while attending Harvard. I’ve done a book review already for Classically Cultured on his memoir, but I’ll list a few enlightening quotes about Miss Bishop’s nuggets of wisdom for her students below. You’ll see she was charming, witty, and had zero, and I mean zero, time for rubbish and teacher’s pet wannabes. I get the feeling from everything I’ve read about her, the worst thing you could probably do is give her a saccharine compliment.

Gioia points out in his memoir, “She wanted no worshipful circle of students, and got none.”

Here’s one excerpt explaining just a bit of what she taught students about poetry:

“One did not interpret poetry; one experienced it. Showing us how to experience it clearly, intensely, and above all, directly was the substance of her teaching. One did not need sophisticated theory. One needed only intelligence, intuition, and a good dictionary. There was no subtext, only the text. A painter among Platonists, she preferred observation to analysis, and poems to poetry.”

Other telling quotes about her character include, “She never articulated her philosophy in class, but she practiced it so consistently that it is easy—especially now, looking back—to see what she was going.”

And, “...politeness was a virtue nurtured in her seminar.”

One of my favorite excerpts details her colorful view of literary critics:

“A poem (if it was any good) could speak for itself. When she criticized the critics, she never spoke abstractly of “literary criticism,” as if it were some branch of knowledge. Instead, she personalized the nemesis by referring collectively to “the critics,” a sort of fumbling conspiracy of well-meaning idiots with access to printing presses.”

In Rich’s piece, she referenced the straight, white, male world of mid-twentieth century literature. She takes great issue with it while also making note that Bishop was one of the few women accepted into this male world. A proper examination of Bishop shows her poetry, while feminine in many ways, was also quite masculine. It can be decorative with descriptions of nature, but straight as an arrow with opening lines. Her lines oscillate between the feminine ethereal and masculine soil and Earth. If you listen closely enough to her lines playing in your head as you read her poetry, you’ll hear a speaker both intensely vulnerable and unapologetically observant. And she blends these two energies masterfully. If this is what the male literary world celebrates as poetry then I say keep the men in charge of it for another one hundred years.

But we all know that didn’t happen. Now, there are no more Bishops. But there are plenty of soft-breasted peacocks.

Elizabeth Bishop, Man’s Poet

Take her poem “The Colder The Air” for example. It was, like I mentioned, the work that inspired this piece. I was immediately taken with it with the first read. The cold atmosphere, the wide open space set against a speaker maintaining a dogged, focused path. The wintery scene suggests white noise has been abandoned upon the speaker’s consciousness. It is her alone with her endgame. Her own weapon and gallery against the weapons and galleries of others. Of course, when it comes to Bishop, they’re no match.

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The Colder The Air

We must admire her perfect aim,
this huntress of the winter air
whose level weapon needs no sight,
if it were not that everywhere
her game is sure, her shot is right.
The least of us could do the same.

The chalky birds or boats stand still,
reducing her conditions of chance;
air's gallery marks identically
the narrow gallery of her glance.
The target-center in her eye
is equally her aim and will.

Time's in her pocket, ticking loud
on one stalled second. She'll consult
not time nor circumstance. She calls
on atmosphere for her result.
(It is this clock that later falls
in wheels and chimes of leaf and cloud.)

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I fell in love with its message immediately. I found it to be an enlivening, far too negligible outlook missing from today’s society. Surprisingly, others who hilariously felt the need to critique a Bishop poem thought it “bleak,” “cold,” “distant,” and other things that would suggest the poem was built with wood rather than the passion-marked hands of a Woman of Letters.

I do confess, I generally see things opposite to others. While cold is often used as symbolism for death, stillness, or emptiness, when described properly, I view it as an unguarded, exposed landscape waiting to be explored, to be lived in, to be won.

My mind dances during the sun-drenched days of summer. My mind hums during the naked twilight of winter. My best work is written when the hair on my skin is raised by a frosty wind.

I think Bishop, who spent a lot of time in wintery Nova Scotia, may have felt the same.

While so many women poets who love to be called women poets revel in their victimhood with their work, Bishop, not the white poet, or the woman poet, or the orphaned poet, or the molested poet—Bishop the poet, like a select few others, viewed herself as an able hunter in her poem, with an aim so perfect no sight is needed for her weapon, and with a force so indomitable nature herself can’t tame, redirect, or distract her. 

If there’s one thing I’d be comfortable calling her besides the succinct “poet” label, it’d be Elizabeth Bishop, man’s poet, and I’m not only talking about men. I’m talking about man as in humankind. A poet who writes, “Icebergs behoove the soul / (both being self-made from elements least visible) / to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible” can’t be boxed in by gender. It goes against the nature of her intelligence and her mind, which for a brief moment, was understood to have absolutely nothing to do with sex.

Flowing, Ice-capped Skyscrapers

Her other work is equally as thought-provoking, centering, and exciting. Many like me were first introduced to her by way of one of her most famous works, “The Art of Losing.” This poem to this day produced a strong sense of melancholy within me. And I don’t use melancholy non-chalantly. It truly, in every sense of the word, does make me happy to feel the sadness within that work. That’s why it’s one of the most transformative poems of contemporary poetry, and one of the most popular American poems still today.

Bishop once stated twice in her poem, “The Imaginary Iceberg,” “We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship.”

Only those who’ve never opened their eyes to the beauty and wonder of nature and poetry think that an iceberg is simply cold, and a poet who prefers them could be colder.

Like icebergs, Bishop remained unmoved by outside forces.

Like icebergs, Bishop brought only what was necessary to the surface, and it was enough to leave humanity in awe of her dominion over her own natural world: poetry.

And when conditions were freezing and unfavorable, unlike most, that’s exactly when Bishop built her path skyward.

The collection of work she leaves behind, giving way to her immortality, is modest—not because she couldn’t produce more, but because she didn’t need to.

Like the genius of the iceberg, her genius can be found in the simple, the straightforward, the jagged edges, and the hard lines.

And if you study her work and you study the frigid Canadian waters of her childhood, you’ll soon find that even divinity’s most awe-inspiring work, like the mighty towering iceberg, pales in comparison to the flowing, ice-capped skyscrapers Bishop wrote. Flowing, ice-capped skyscrapers readers will continue to study long after the glaciers of winter have melted. And long after they rise again, and again, and again.

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