Introduction

Elizabeth Bishop’s current status and critical acclaim as the most highly regarded American poet of the mid-twentieth century is well known. She is easily the most widely taught American woman poet of the twentieth century. Invariably, Bishop is the most widely taught woman poet in English language after Emily Dickinson (especially in American universities).[i] What however is less well known is the consensually implausible attempt by some critics to smuggle and find room for Bishop within the seemingly overcrowded, highly elitist space of confessional poetry by default. This default inclusion of Bishop into the confessional poets’ class is as a result of some muddle readings of Bishop’s poetry.

Like her contemporaries, Bishop realises what was on offer as far as poetry is concerned in the wake of Modernism; but unlike other poets of her generation she does not consider nor attempt to turn the modern poet’s varied and contradictory values into a point of opposition. Her poetry subsequently shows no sign of a “breakthrough”: the so-called throwing off of the modernist shackles. But – and this is important – she strengthens some aspects of Modernism that other poets ignored. Bishop’s contemporaries (the poets in the confessional circle that she is often linked with) have the same attitude to autobiography and their immediate past – confessional poetry’s main ingredients. They also have the same regard towards lyric form: whether it is traditional or free. Form for the confessional poets as it is for Bishop represents their poetic expression, not something that could be waded through. Yet form and our sense of what constitutes a confessional poem cannot be restricted to a specific style of writing. The poetry of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop for instance are influenced by a realisation of what is “up for grabs” after Modernism; their differing styles constitute equally genuine reactions to Modernism. And as far as Lowell and Bishop are both seriously sceptical of the admission of social relevance to any specific style, they have a lot more in common. But much more than Lowell Bishop is aware that all types of poetry, as linguistic artefact, give one or more avenue via which the world is encountered or experienced. Yet a persistent doubt about conventional form lingers to remind us of her apotheosis, in spite of the fact that she has become the most acclaimed poet among her contemporaries. Many critics and readers alike have tried to enhance her prestige by misreading her slow and surprising development as a triumph of freer style, direct confession, and more overt political concerns. To do this is to misrepresent Bishop through an old-fashioned idea of Modernism – just as that idea of modernism is in other perspectives outdated.[ii] Therefore this essay sets out to explore Bishop’s poem, “In the Waiting Room” within the paradigm of the confessional mode in order to show how flawed a reading would be to regard Bishop as a confessional poet.