Innocents Abroad? Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill Overseas

This chapter investigates the ways in which both Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill acknowledged their complicity in cultural erosions that they wished to see forestalled in Brazil and Greece, respectively. As Robert von Hallberg has noted, what often renders the genre of the ‘protest poem’ so two-dimensional is the lack of any sense of complicity in what is being protested, as if the poet was unwilling or unable to see his/her own role in the events and processes that the poem decries. Neither Bishop nor Merrill suffered from this kind of shortcoming of vision. At the heart of many of their poems which lament a given state of affairs is a strong sense that they are in part responsible for that state of affairs, and this makes these poems not weaker, as a result of an embedded hypocrisy, but stronger, as a result of an unwillingness to succumb to the delusion that oneself could possibly be free of blame.