Metaphors of Innocence and Chiidhood: Parallels in Elizabeth Bishop and Three Seventeenth-century Metaphysical Poets

Abstract

The vivid imagery and subtle wit of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry have intrigued me ever since I first encountered her work in an undergraduate seminar at the University of Utah. Moving from regularly anthologized poems such as "The Fish" to the more obscure "Nova Scotia" poems and then into scholarly criticism of Bishop's work, I was dismayed to discover that many critics read her poems as touching, cathartic encounters with her tragic childhood instead of deliberate pieces of fiction. Even very helpful bibliographies, such as the recent one by Barbara Page, call poems featuring child speakers "autobiographical" or discuss critics' explorations of "autobiographical" elements, without defining or proving why they are autobiographical. Finding no help in the critics, I turned to other poets and, following T. s. Eliot's lead, looked back to the imagefilled worlds of George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan. In their poetry, I found parallel metaphors of childhood and poetic techniques that helped me modify the purely autobiographical readings of Bishop and establish her as part of a poetic tradition. This study does not try to prove that the seventeenth-century poets influenced Bishop, but instead aims to refute the autobiographical readings by establishing technical and thematic parallels.