Wagner’s relationship with Paris was a career-long struggle with a highly developed music industry that aligned badly with his aesthetic priorities. On repeat visits for what we would now call career networking, he rented in marginal areas of Paris, tried to get on the publishing and performance ladder, courted imperial favour, conducted concerts of his own works, and finally succeeded, briefly, in getting an opera staged at the Paris Opéra (the ill-fated Tannhäuser in 1861). Thereafter, Wagner cults – always contested – began in the concert hall, where anything from riots to hushed listening greeted programmed excerpts of his works. Cultishness intensified after his death – in the press, in artistic and high-bourgeois salons, and finally at the Opéra. This chapter explores the spaces, networks, and contexts within which Wagner attempted to carve out a Paris career which allowed the full concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk to blossom only posthumously.

Bishop’s Florida, Brazil, and Nova Scotia poems have, over the years, accrued significant scholarly attention. This chapter turns to a less clearly delineated set of New York poems and argues that from her early years in the city as a recent graduate (1934–5) into the late 1960s and beyond, New York’s culture and environment exerted a pull on Bishop’s imagination and an influence on her aesthetic. We see this from early poems and drafts such as “Love Lies Sleeping” (1937) and “Varick Street” (1947) to much later ones including “Five Flights Up” (c.1973) which, although not necessarily written in or even explicitly about New York, is nevertheless inflected by her experience and memories of it.

Bishop’s Florida, Brazil, and Nova Scotia poems have, over the years, accrued significant scholarly attention. This chapter turns to a less clearly delineated set of New York poems and argues that from her early years in the city as a recent graduate (1934–5) into the late 1960s and beyond, New York’s culture and environment exerted a pull on Bishop’s imagination and an influence on her aesthetic. We see this from early poems and drafts such as “Love Lies Sleeping” (1937) and “Varick Street” (1947) to much later ones including “Five Flights Up” (c.1973) which, although not necessarily written in or even explicitly about New York, is nevertheless inflected by her experience and memories of it.