Repetition and Poetic Process: Bishop’s Nagging Thoughts

This chapter raises important issues about Bishop’s aesthetic response to a double, but crucially different set of traumas during infancy (death of her father and ‘disappearance’ of her mother) and argues that repetition in Bishop’s writing signals specific anxieties about loss. The compulsion to repeat, Freud writes, takes ‘the place of the impulse to remember’. Christopher Bollas’ concept of the ‘unthought known’ is applied to consider Bishop’s negotiation with both what is known and yet cannot be spoken. Drawing closely on Bishop’s original drafts, this chapter offers a close analysis of the poem ‘Questions of Travel’ to think about its wider importance as the title of Bishop’s 1965 volume. In paying particular attention to the way in which the volume’s chronological development can be read in counterpoint to its final order on publication, I argue that in the volume Bishop finds an important aesthetic resolution to set against a biographical narrative.