Elizabeth Bishop: Poet Without Myth
Nathan A. Scott
The English critic John Bayley is, I believe, quite wrong when in his book, The Characters of Love, he says of Conrad: "He has no myth with a view to insight: he has scenes and he has people." But no more apt a formula could be devised for such a poet as Elizabeth Bishop: she is, indeed, a poet without myth, without meta- , physic, without commitment to any systematic vision of the world, perhaps the most thoroughly secular poet of her generation—and it makes an impressive, attestation to her extraordinary record of successes in her dealings simply with the world of eye and ear that, even so, she was well-nigh universally regarded at the time of her death in October 1979 as one who had ridded something to our literature in the ways that only genius can.
Since by some quirk of misfortune she won no "myth with a view to insight" such as a Yeats or a Stevens or an Auden was granted, it was no doubt inevitable that her poetry should always be (as one of her critics has remarked) a kind of expedition, just as her own life was that of the constant voyager to Brittany and Paris, to North Africa and Spain, to Mexico and Scandinavia and Brazil. When she accepted the Neustadt International Prize for Literature at the University of Oklahoma in the spring of 1976, she spoke about how all her life she had "lived and behaved very much like .... [a] sandpiper—just running along the edges of different countries and continents, "looking for something."" Which is not
