Collecting Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments

edited and annotated by Alice Quinn

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 367 pages

This new collection of previously unpublished writing by Elizabeth Bishop is a welcome addition to her body of work, one which should appeal to the Bishop specialist and the general reader alike. Bishop was famously reluctant to publish anything that didn't meet her exacting standards: she often worked on poems for years or even decades, with the slightness of her literary output testifying to her unerring ability to distinguish between the finished and unfinished work. As anyone who has visited the Bishop archive at the Vassar College Library knows, however, the material deemed unfinished is both plentiful and fascinating. This collection of "poems, drafts, and fragments" culled from the Vassar archive not only provides us with some poems certain to enter the Bishop canon but no less importantly illuminates Bishop's writing process and poetic ideals, yielding a wealth of new perspectives on the work she chose to publish during her lifetime.

The appearance of this collection has sparked vigorous debate among Bishop's admirers, with some readers suggesting that, given Bishop's literary perfectionism, she would not have approved of its publication. Bishop's "Crusoe in England" perhaps best expresses her ambivalence about the posthumous fate of her literary remains. Crusoe, contemplating the local museum's request for the remnants of his island sojourn--"the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes, / my shedding goatskin trousers / (moths have got in the fur)"--asks, "How can anyone want such things?" (Complete Poems 166). Although Crusoe's relics occasion painful memories of everyday hardship ("the knife there on the shelf--// How many years did I / beg it, implore it, not to break?"), the museum's request signifies the more general alienation Crusoe feels from his past as he is subsumed into its legend; he comments of his knife that it "won't look at me at all. / The living soul has dribbled away." Through Crusoe Bishop conveys an acute awareness of the costs of allowing one's artifacts--redolent with private memory and feeling--to meet the public's uncomprehending, perhaps voyeuristic gaze through the agency of the museum or collection. And yet in the poem Crusoe does not turn down the museum's request for his objects, and neither did Bishop.

In fact, Bishop not only saved all of the unfinished poems and drafts that appear in Quinn's collection but, as her biographer Brett Millier notes, hoped to sell her unpublished writings (540), suggesting that she envisioned the public gaining some kind of access to them. If her own treatment of questions of literary reception can serve as a guide, then at some level, in spite of her deep ambivalence, she hoped that her readers would find their way to these writings. In a 1975 letter that Quinn quotes in the notes to the collection, Bishop responds to a Miss Pierson who has sought advice on poetry (249). Bishop recommends reading the great poets of the past, then the great poets of the twentieth century, here cautioning Miss Pierson to read "not just 2 ot 3 poems each, in anthologies--read ALL of somebody. Then read his or her life, and letters, and so on. (And by all means read Keats's Letters.) Then see what happens." In this instance Bishop suggests the importance of letters and biography to a full appreciation of a writer's work. Even if in her own case she couldn't contemplate this kind of self-exposure without feelings of shame or horror, in saving her journals, letters, and drafts she seemed to understand the necessity, even the desirability, of receiving full historical treatment as a major writer. If we look at how other major twentieth-century writers have been treated, we see a clear precedent for publishing drafts and uncollected works, with the understanding that these posthumous collections are meant to supplement and illuminate, not tarnish, the record of the published works.

The Bishop archive at Vassar College presented Quinn with several challenges in selecting and editing the collection. The archive contains drafts of published works as well as unpublished poems, unpublished prose, notebooks and travel diaries, personal and professional correspondence, financial and legal documents, artwork, biographical material, and memorabilia. Quinn's aim, in her own words, was to "present a thoroughly representative selection of the draft material in the archive" (xvii) with an emphasis on work that demonstrates "artistic ambition" or "biographical significance." This selection process was complicated by the fact that in many cases, there are multiple drafts--even as many as a dozen or more drafts--of poems, often spanning years or even decades. While in some cases the chronology of drafts is clear, this is not always true. Quinn has organized the collection in approximate chronological order, but she emphasizes that her ordering of the material "is in no manner definitive," and in her extensive notes to the poems she discusses the sources (letters, notebooks, biographies, and scholarship) that helped her to date the material. Moreover, while Bishop typed some drafts, she wrote others by hand, and her small, cramped handwriting is difficult to decipher. Quinn's policy was to choose "the most coherent, intact draft--the fullest and/or most legible available--rather than opt for a less decipherable or less complete version of a more advanced draft" (xvii-xviii). She discusses revisions and variants, but short of publishing a facsimile edition of all the drafts of a given poem, the reader must trust Quinn's choices.