Gioia on Bishop

Dana Gioia has an interesting assessment of Elizabeth Bishop in The Wall Street Journal. Here are a few bites:

HER ACHIEVEMENT

Elizabeth Bishop's future reputation will surely fluctuate slightly according to the currents of taste, but she has indisputably won a permanent place in the American literary canon. An independent and honest writer who never chased fashion, joined groups or struck public poses, she labored at the art's perennial task—to communicate the joy, sorrow and wonder of being human. She took her time about it, and it shows.

BISHOP VS. MODERNISM

There is a special irony that Bishop has come to be the signature poet of late 20th-century American literature, a period stereotyped by free verse and experimental forms. Bishop admired Modernism, but she resisted being drawn into its endless arguments about stylistic innovation and the radical transformation of human consciousness. She was, in the highest sense of the word, a prosaic poet, who like the supreme prose masters—Flaubert, James, Na bok ov —could create a verbal fabric so fine that nothing was lost to it. Never trying to be merely modern, she succeeded in becoming perpetually immediate and contemporary.

ELSEWHERE

To see a few good images of Bishop's homes in Brazil and read a little about how she was and is seen there, fly here.