• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.25-59
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• 2009

This study explores the characteristics of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry in comparison with the two of her closest friends and poets, Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Bishop's reputation has dramatically changed since her death. In the 1970s she was "a writer's writer's writer," and admired by a small group of poets or critics. Since 1990s, however, there has been a great shift in the evaluation of her poetry, which is so called "The Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon." It does not seem to be an easy task to examine what has driven the phenomenon, and why she used to be a minor poet or "the most honored yet most elusive of poets" but now she has a widespread recognition by the academy and beyond it. The "intrinsic qualities" of Bishop's poetry, however, can be one of the main reasons why it took several decades for Bishop to become a central figure in the literary canon. Looking into her "intrinsic qualities," this paper discusses Bishop's "The Fish," "Roosters" through the Moore-Bishop relationship, and reads Bishop's "Armadillo" and "The Monument" through the Lowell-Bishop relationship. It also deals with letters, interviews, Moore's "The Fish," and Lowell's "Skunk Hour" and "For the Union Dead" to show the Bishop's deep and complex relationships with the two poets, and more importantly their differences. Bishop's poetry is difficult, "elusive," and sometimes "enigmatic," not because her texts are full of difficult words to understand but because there are the subtle interchange between perception and meaning, "the dynamics of keen feeling," the unresolved patterns, and the transient vision under the seemingly transparent surface of the texts.