20 pages • 40 minutes read
Sestina
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Background
Cultural Context: The Un-Confessional Poet
It is difficult to underestimate the cultural impact in the 1920s of the publication of the until-then largely unknown poetry of Emily Dickinson. For the emerging generation of young poets, among them Elizabeth Bishop, who would hone their craft in the 1930s and 1940s, Dickinson’s quietly subversive poetry was both a revelation and a revolution.
In Dickinson’s poetry, Bishop’s generation found license to introduce into poetry the traumas and emotional turmoil of their private lives.
Dickinson’s poetry was like paging through her diary. She introduced the radical concept of the poet, unrefined and blemished, as a persona fit for expression in verse. The self-described Confessional poets of the 1930s and 1940s used the vehicle of poetry to explore private conflicts once deemed unfit or too unseemly for the public forum of poetry. These poets examined mental illness, suicide ideation, dysfunctional relationships, and sexual orientation. These poets, most notably Robert Lowell (a friend of Bishop’s), Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman, shaded their generation’s signature verse in dark and forbidding tones.
Bishop could easily have fit in with the Confessional poets given her significant life traumas: the sudden death of her father, the institutionalization of her mother, her painful childhood search for a home, and her later explorations of her sexuality. However, Bishop rejected the Confessional poets’ investment in the poet’s experiences, preferring to focus on the discipline of crafting poetry.
“Sestina” could have been written in first person. Bishop, however, regarded a poem as more of an aesthetic construct. Thus, she develops a persona at once ironic and detached, aloof from the confusion of emotions in the rural kitchen. She observes the grandmother and the child and notes details in the kitchen that reveal the emotions they are unwilling or unable to express. Distrusting the heart and wary of the benefits of confession, Bishop is more of an observer than a participant in her poems. Much like the girl with her crayons, Bishop finds joy in the constructs of art itself.
Literary Context: The Influence of Marianne Moore
By the time Bishop first read the poetry of Marianne Moore (1887-1972), she was a senior English major at Vassar. Through the connection of a college librarian, Bishop journeyed to Brooklyn to meet the poet, living then in quiet obscurity and barely making ends meet. Twenty years Bishop’s senior, Moore had long tired of student admirers—and then she read Bishop’s apprentice poetry. The friendship quickly developed into a mentorship. For nearly 40 years, Bishop maintained a correspondence with Moore in which Moore encouraged and even edited Bishop’s drafts, offering her young protégé advice on pursuing promising publication possibilities.
Much as Bishop would become, Moore was regarded as a poet’s poet (See: Further Reading & Resources). Drawing on the template of Modernism, most notably the erudite and cerebral poetry of T. S. Eliot, Moore crafted precise and delicate poems that offered keen observations of the world, particularly nature. She rendered those reflections in poetic lines that were tirelessly revised and chiseled into clean and clear concision. She had no interest nor patience with market popularity. She counseled Bishop to avoid using poetry to indulge in emotional recklessness and directed Bishop away from the carelessness of free verse that became chic in the 1950s. Moore introduced Bishop to the responsibility of a poet to discipline language into an aesthetic form. Poetry, Bishop learned from Moore, should be evocative, not descriptive; oblique, rather than direct; and precise, rather than idiosyncratic.
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By Elizabeth Bishop
