The Literary Litter of the Littoral-Minded: Elizabeth Bishop's Ideas of Disorder at Key West

[Over the next few weeks we will be posting links to video and audio recordings of some of the presentations given at the recent Elizabeth Bishop Centenary Conference at the University of King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Our first speaker is Zachariah Wells of the University of New Brunswick. -- JB]

Zachariah Wells
[photo: John W. MacDonald]

The Literary Litter of the Littoral-Minded:
Elizabeth Bishop's Ideas of Disorder at Key West

Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Bight" is a work of almost pure description. Embedded in, and protruding through, the sheer surface of Bishop's poem, however, are a number of literary allusions. Those allusions orient the poem and its author in relation to a number of important precursors, including Baudelaire, Hopkins, Herbert, Wordsworth, Whitman, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens. In each case, Bishop encodes a fraught exchange, establishing affinities and asserting independence. The explicit subject of "The Bight" is the harbour of Key West, but my reading of the poem demonstrates that it is also concerned with "place" as status, as Bishop negotiates her relationship with the literary canon to which she now unequivocally belongs.

This paper is a condensed excerpt taken from a long essay on "The Bight." Another excerpt will be published soon by The Worcester Review.