Comparing Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
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...