The Cambridge History of American Poetry
Abstract
Georgia Southern University faculty member Richard Flynn authored “Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and the Lost World of Real Feeling” in the publication The Cambridge History of American Poetry.
Chapter Summary: On October 29, 1964, at a reading at the Guggenheim Museum celebrating Elizabeth Bishop’s $5,000 fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, Randall Jarrell read Elizabeth Bishop’s poems and his own because Bishop was unable to leave Brazil to receive the award. Robert Lowell, a longtime friend of both poets, introduced the reading, and his introduction reflected his estimation of each poet’s reputation, an estimation that would remain the conventional wisdom for years to come. Speaking first of his good friend Bishop, he 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.” Echoing Jarrell’s review of North & South (1946) as well as his own, Lowell praised Bishop’s “eye” and her “tolerance and humor” and noted the “beautiful formal completeness” of her poetry. He also repeated the unfortunate sexism of his own review, noting that Bishop was “one of the two or three best women poets in the language.” Introducing his friend Jarrell, Lowell described him primarily as a brilliant critic who had once written some of the finest poems about World War II and as the “last of the great critics.” Although he praised Jarrell’s recent poetry for its “Chekhovian directness and subtlety,” one senses that Lowell (and indeed Bishop) would not have disagreed with Helen Vendler’s judgment that Jarrell put his “genius into his criticism and his talent into his poetry.”
