Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery [Paperback]

Bonnie Costello (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 1993 | ISBN-10: 067424690X | ISBN-13: 978-0674246904

A profoundly visual poet, Elizabeth Bishop is said to have a prismatic way of seeing. In this companion to Bishop's poetry, making connections between modern art and modern poetry, Bonnie Costello aims to give a sense of the poet and her ways of seeing and writing. Costello also makes use of quotations from Bishop's letters, drafts, journals and occasional prose sketches.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

As her title suggests, Costello argues through close reading of several poems that Bishop's "strong urge for order and dominance" or "mastery" is balanced by her insistence on "encountering" and even "exhilarating" in "the mess of life." Costello provides a stronger sense of individual poems and of the poet's intellectual dilemmas than of her gestalt of life. It may be that her wish to avoid political issues prevents her from philosophical as well as psychobiographical speculation about what drives Bishop's competing desires for mastery and constraint or flux and freedom. Yet Costello's readings are both so detailed and so insightful that her cumulative vision of the poet is profound and sustaining. Highly recommended.
- Cristanne Miller, Pomona Coll., Claremont, Cal.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Essential reading for anyone interested in Elizabeth Bishop's life and art . . . Bishop's struggle as an heir to modernism comes alive in Costello's precise prose. (Women's Review of Books )

Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery explores the connection between the poet's descriptive passion arid her ecphrastic imagination. Costello is interested in ... stratagems of design to which Bishop resorts in a desire for mastery over world and self ... The connections Costello makes between modern art and modern poetry are valuable, imaginative, and licit.
--Judith Farr, Belles Lettres

Costello traces Bishop's progress toward her quite clear rejection of 'the magisterial claims of art' in a series of dazzlingly close readings of the poems, including a handful that have rarely been discussed . . . I have been reading Bishop for ten years. and it seems to me that until l read Costello's explications of 'Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance, ''Roosters' and 'Pink Dog,' I had not read them at all.
--Brett Miller, Harvard Review

A guide to Bishop's poetry and an appreciation of her unique qualities as an observer. The generous quotations from letters, drafts, journals, and occasional prose sketches both deepen and confirm the analysis here, and make the result a work of criticism that has some of the suggestive power of biography.
--David Bromwich

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 15, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067424690X
• ISBN-13: 978-0674246904
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,490,549 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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