Conceal/Reveal: Passion and Restraint in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop Or Why We Care about Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetry

Although the words Conceal/Reveal can be used to describe the special relationship that Elizabeth Bishop had to her work, they can also more importantly describe the relationship of a poet, any poet, to the events in his or her life. This essay follows the idea of “The Cry” through the work of Elizabeth Bishop, especially “In the Village,” “In the Waiting Room,” “The Man Moth,” “One Art.” Historically Bishop falls between the “impersonality” so admired in the poetry of Eliot and Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore and others of her early education, and the “confessional” movement—a (dismissive) epithet applied to the experiments of her contemporary, Robert Lowell, and his group. Bishop chose the “middle way.” Passionate outcry—as it travels—implodes into—/becomes—/the merest punctuation mark—that breaks your heart. The reticence, the “not said,” and the “half-said” in Bishop’s work determine the poignant spaces between the words, lines, stanzas. It is in the geography of these spaces that poems breathe up their unique meanings, and it is in that counterpoint that poetry exists. The theme of the “Cry” is transformed from its earliest childhood shock and horror (“In the Village”) into a cosmic/religious world view through “art–” (fullness). In Bishop’s quite formal later work, with specific reference to “One Art,” we see love, loss, and the distance/absence from love become transformed; the very act of concealing—or pretending to conceal—or even of playing with the idea of trying to conceal—reveals unbearable emotion. The “cry” becomes suggested, soundless. Like an ancient Chinese master painter, near the end of her life, Bishop conveys both presence and absence in a definitive stroke of the brush: a hyphen; two simple words; an exclamation point!