Comparing Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
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Comparing Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, both modern poets, have many similarities, not only in their writing, but emotionally as well. Bishop dedicates her poem, “The Armadillo,” to Lowell. Remarkably, Lowell’s poem, “Skunk Hour,” is dedicated to Bishop in the same manner. That is not the only similarity. Both Bishop and Lowell use symbols to convey the relationships between humans and nature. Personification is a most useful method to describe the animals as the animals in their poems are said to represent Bishop and Lowell. They admire each other’s writing and writing techniques, and that makes them unique in the literary world.
Poems are very delicate and personal works of literature. All poets go to great lengths to achieve the results they desire when writing a poem. A majority of poems are works of literature that are dedicated to someone or something in some way or another. Some might not physically express that a poem is dedicated to someone, but the characters or the plot in the poem could symbolize a person that only the receiver of the dedication would realize. Both Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell dedicated poems to each other. Both poems use animals to represent symbols, or could possibly represent each other; however, no one knows the answer for sure except the poets themselves: Bishop and Lowell. From the meanings and symbols found in their poems, one could find the missing link to understanding how the poems are very much similar.
Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell go together like hand and foot, or clown and circus. As the best of friends, Bishop and Lowell’s attractions to each other’s works does not rest there, but their attractions to each other play a major roll in their writing. Aside from their attractions to each other, Bishop and Lowell shared one common personality trait: “Loneliness” (Bowers). Both had been hurt when they were children in a traumatic manner, but they were able to put those feelings of despair aside and concentrate on their works. Bishop’s attractiveness to Lowell rests in the fact that he “was the leading poet of the day, someone to measure her own work against, even if she openly resisted confessional poetry” (Bowers). As for Lowell, Bishop was “a woman…whose poetry was different enough from his own that he felt himself instructed by it” (Bowers).
Both Elizabeth Bishop and Lowell shared a feeling of internal loneliness throughout most of their lives. Bishop had been wounded deeply when she was young, and this traumatic event in her life manifested itself in the form of loneliness for years to come. The roots of her loneliness began when she was orphaned at age five. Her father died when she was eight months old, and her mother went “mad from grief and [was] then institutionalized for the rest of her life” (Bowers).
Lowell, too, spent much of his life suffering from loneliness. Bowers describes Lowell’s past with explicit detail and states that he “moored in the bay of his illustrious family, at once embraced and effaced of his heritage, and rowed into the swells and deepest sounds of his oceanic ego.” Bishop and Lowell identified with each other much like tourists in foreign countries. They were all alone except for “the isolate company of the other” (Bowers).
Commonplace objects and occurrences had unusual symbolic meanings for Bishop, and many of her poems take the form of meditations on external objects and events. Her precision on focusing on the external world gives her poetry strong emotions. Travel is a major theme throughout many of her poems, and her ability to create a sense of strangeness to everyday events puts her into a category of her own.
Much of Lowell’s poetry is centered on the events of the time. His first volume of poems reflected the disturbing effects of World War II. In the 1950s, his new poetry concerning personal problems and beliefs established him as a leader in the birth of confessional poetry. Later in the 1960s, his poetry took a turn for the more political image of society. Throughout his poetic life, Lowell had a passion to “express in his poetry both objective and subjective views of the turmoil of the contemporary world” (Encarta).
Bishop’s poem, “The Armadillo,” is one of her most well known poems. What makes this poem so well known are the troubling disturbances that take place throughout the poem. During this time of celebration, the people view “frail, illegal fire balloons” (3) rising up into the night sky. These are possibly fireworks, but there is not a definite answer. The demonstration displayed is even considered “an aspiration to godliness” (“The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop”), and can be viewed as that in lines nine through ten: “Once up against the sky it’s hard/ to tell them from the stars.” These images seem to create an awe-inspiring presentation to the locals. Although the humans are enjoying this sight, the animal kingdom becomes very much frightened. As the wind shifts, the ball of fire descends back to the earth and forces a family of owls resting in their nests to retreat and take to the air until “they shrieked up out of sight” (28). The owls are not the only fearful animals attempting to escape the raining fire. An armadillo, probably the most well-armored of all the animals in the forest, becomes frightened and decides to leave “the scene/ rose-flecked, head down, tail down” (31-32). The imagery Bishop creates allows the reader not to see a fireworks display, but rather the fireworks becoming “bombs of war” (“The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop”).
In Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” animals are also used throughout the plot of his poem. After completing this poem, Lowell began to believe that real poetry does not come from inner feelings of happiness or despair, but rather insignificant images. In “Skunk Hour,” the first four stanzas are a description of a “declining Maine sea town” (Lowell 210). Throughout the poem, Lowell tries to “give a tone of tolerance, humor, and randomness to the sand prospect” (Lowell 210), and these tones can be seen in the line reading, “we’ve lost our summer millionaire” (14). Lowell included a homosexual interior decorator to add more humor to his poem. The first twenty-four lines are very important not only in the text, but also reflect reality as “Lowell gives us a masterful survey of what is wrong with society” (Dickey 258). Lowell’s skillfulness leaves the reader with a mystery to figure out: Who is the summer millionaire? He is a person who retires to the town during the summer only portraying to be a millionaire rather than being one. He displays the town people as being lethargic. The proof of this statement can be seen in his description of the interior decorator because “there is no money in his work,/ he’d rather marry” (23-24). To justify the meaning of the skunks, Lowell states that the “skunks are both quixotic and barbarously absurd, hence the tone of amusement and defiance” (210).
Bishop’s poem, “The Armadillo,” is dedicated to Robert Lowell. There is no real clear meaning as to why she did this, so only assumptions can be made. It is said this poem “influenced Lowell’s transformation from the strict formalism of ‘Lord Weary’s Castle’ to the more colloquial and personal tone of ‘Life Studies’ and, in particular, the writing of his poem ‘Skunk Hour’” (Lensing 80). This could possibly mean Bishop wanted Lowell to try a new style of poetry, and he, in turn, did just that with his poem “Skunk Hour.” After reading her poem in disbelief, Lowell “acknowledged, ‘rereading her I couldn’t understand why my own style was so armored heavy and old-fashioned’” (Lensing 80). Bishop had such a breakthrough effect on Lowell’s writing techniques it caused him to revolutionize his approach to writing poetry. Lowell was particularly fond of her new tone, rhythms, imagery, and stanza formation, as read in “The Armadillo.” One very popular aspect to Bishop’s poem is its sense of balance. Lensing states that “the habitually shifting rhythms of the poem do not allow the reader to lose himself in its lyric music; instead, they keep jolting him to recognition, thereby keeping him from ‘taking sides’—from becoming, that is, too caught up either in the beauty of the balloons of the terror of the animals” (80). Bishop’s poetry, especially “The Armadillo,” has received much praise for its revealing secrets. Most of these key symbols and hidden meanings go unnoticed to the untrained eye, which makes a work such as this so praise-worthy.
Lowell, too, is also honorably praised for his achievements in poetic techniques in “Skunk Hour.” The speaker begins the poem by describing his surroundings of this particular day in time. The speaker does more than just describe the lay of the land, but he also describes the issues facing society. Although he does not blatantly list the problems, he justifies them when one reads between the lines and notes the “ecclesiastical, political, economic, social, sexual, and artistic” (Dickey 258) concerns challenging the community. Towards the middle of the poem, the meaning takes a surprising twist. The speaker begins to describe the corruptions he is guilty of, including probably the most shocking line in the poem: “I myself am hell” (35). The last twelve lines in the poem refer to the skunks and how they are fearless of their surroundings. Lowell describes the community in Maine as being totally corrupted, except for one major character: The skunks. Only the skunks are innocent of any corruptions facing the community, and “in their ignorance seem to tacitly point a way for [human] redemption” (Dickey 80). The tone of the poem is, without question, dispirited. One can realize this since the poem’s setting is approaching fall and winter—the seasons most associated with death. As the poem ends, a mother skunk is with her litter searching for food in front of the townspeople. This image suggests that “as humans we can create any number of imaginative activities and views of life, but when we pull our heads out of these imaginative sands and look at the world, what we see is a constant struggle between life and death” (Walling).
The poems “The Armadillo” by Elizabeth Bishop and “Skunk Hour” by Robert Lowell have many similarities not only in their images, but in their meanings as well. These poems have been praised for decades for the talented themes and techniques used to produce such works of art. Bishop and Lowell both influenced each other, Bishop more than Lowell, however. Their use of animals in their poems gives the reader an opportunity to use the mind to try to seek their meanings and decode the symbols behind the animals. Most poets tend to write about their innermost feelings; however, Bishop and Lowell employ life’s joys and hardships to create their works. They pay close attention to their emphasis on detail. When one reads their poetry, one is able to literally paint a picture of the setting in one’s head because of the imagery created in their poetry. There is not one minor detail left out which could distract the reader from fully comprehending the speaker’s surroundings. Bishop and Lowell’s poetry has become more popular throughout the years because people are able to relate the hardships mentioned in their poetry to the issues of the present. Poetry is a special kind of language and implies such ideas such as “attitudes, joy, indignation, compassion, pity, rage, commiseration, empathy, and other thoughts or emotions” (Dickey 258) that are not necessarily considered a spoken language. Bishop and Lowell have come to master this skill and implement these tools so one can fully appreciate the value their poems offer. Bishop and Lowell will always be remembered as poets that belonged in a class of their own, and the honor they have earned will not be forgotten by this generation or generations to follow.
Works Cited
Bowers, Neal. “Bishop and Lowell a Friendship of an Era.” Sewanee Review Winter 1996: 104. Academic Search Premier. 19 Mar. 2002. GALILEO.
Dickey, R. P. Sewanee Review (1974): 738-39. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Carolyn Riley and Phyllis Carmel Mendelson. Vol. 5. Detroit: Gale, 1976. 258.
Lensing, George S. “The Subtraction of Emotion in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop.” The Gettysburg Review. (1992): 48-61. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Elisabeth Gellert. Vol. 34. Farmington Hills: Gale, 2002. 80.
Lowell, Robert. “On Skunk Hour.” Robert Lowell: A Collection of Critical Essays. (1968): 131-34. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Robyn Young. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale, 1992. 210-11.
“Lowell, Robert Traill Spence, Jr.” CD-ROM. Redmond: Microsoft Encarta Encycolpedia. 2001.
“The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop.” Literary Cavalcade Jan. 1998: 50. Academic Search Premier. 25 Mar. 2002. GALILEO.
Walling, M. “Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour.’” Explicator Winter 1991: 49. Academic Search Premier. 25 Mar. 2002. GALILEO. |
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