Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T21:20:27.317Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 34 - Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and the Lost World of Real Feeling

from Part III - Forms of Modernism, 1900–1950

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2014

Alfred Bendixen
Affiliation:
Princeton University, New Jersey
Stephen Burt
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

Elizabeth Bishop noted that her poetry differed both from the standardized somewhat machine-made Academic poem and from poetry that comes through with a sort of shocking vulgarity and coarseness of mind. Bishop, as Lowell's commentary at the 1964 reading notes, was also a poet who refused to write the standard academic poem fashionable at mid-century, nor did she write the kind of confessional poem that was quickly supplanting it. The critical ambivalence about Losses surfaced in part because Jarrell's postwar subject matter was emerging in that volume, in poems such as Moving. Like Jarrell's late poem The Lost World, moving also frames the perceptions of the child against the more jaded reflections of the adult. The woman's predicament hearkens back to Jarrell's polemical essays criticizing American consumer culture, as she wanders the aisles of the supermarket among the detergents cheer, joy and all vainly seeking their emotional equivalents.
Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×