Over 30 Examples and an Incomplete Emergence: Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell in, on, and with Anthologies

Abstract This article tabulates the dimensions of Bishop’s and Lowell’s anthology appearances, contextualizing such data with respect to their careers as consumers, producers, and critics of anthologies, which proved lifelong occupations for both poets. Delineating their paramount achievements and their prevailing frustrations with respect to anthologies, this article offers a clearer sense of their poetic achievements and of their changing reputations: if Lowell was the more anthologized poet in the twentieth century, Bishop has begun to surpass him in the twenty-first century, for reasons that are simultaneously poetic and political.