Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. First we consider Bishop as “poets’ poets’ poet” (John Ashbery) vs. “almost a novelist” (John Hollander) in her perfectionism, variety, humor, restraint, and outward-focus, and compare her to contemporaries like her friend Robert Lowell. Then we map her biography according to the places she lived: Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, Key West, Brazil, and more. Then we survey her poems of Brazil, with their suspended identification between native and colonizer, and their potential for visionary initiation; her prose piece “In the Village” recalling her childhood in Nova Scotia caught between her mother’s formless scream and the blacksmith’s form-giving art; her poem “Sandpiper” and its tribute to or quarrel with William Blake; the multiple identifications inspired by her recounted childhood experience “In the Waiting Room”; her wry self-portraits as a retired “Crusoe in England” and object of colonial surveillance in “Twelve O’Clock News”; and finally the ultimate synthesis of formal constraint and formless passion in the villanelle “One Art.” Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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