While many critics have noted ways in which Bishop writes indirectly and obliquely about war, it should also be noted that when her first volume, North & South, appeared in 1946, Louise Bogan, reviewing the book in The New Yorker, had no difficulty registering the presence of war in Bishop’s poetry, declaring that it “contains all manner of references to war and warriors.” Life-long readers of Bishop understand how the profound, insinuative workings of her layered language allows them at times to focus on how she was able to keep war at a distance, while also opening her poetic consciousness to its inexorable

presence. She lived and wrote both inside and outside the camp. With the end of WW II and the coming of the Atomic Age, a new note of apocalyptic threat emerges in Bishop’s poetry. Her Cold War poetry reflects the sense that no one is any longer a “civilian.”

Beyond Europe, the European imperialist security community proved too divided to act on non-European issues with a unified voice. European self-interest and Iberian resistance stood in the way of an early nineteenth-century plan to include the United States in the European system, and the non-European world was not considered as an equal partner at the negotiating table. From 1830 onwards, France was no longer considered an aggressor or enemy. The network of fortifications was losing its function, and the reputation of Allied solidarity slowly crumbled. The instruments to curb terror had spawned new protests and resistance across Europe. A novel, nationalist and radical rhetoric trumped the emotional vocabulary of ‘balance’, ‘moderation’ and collective security, and Spanish, Portuguese, South American, Belgian and German voices of dissent considered the Allied interventions too exclusive and imperialistic. Allied dictates were ignored, or openly rebelled against with radical counter-violence.