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Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell
Becoming a Poet traces the evolution of Elizabeth Bishop's poetic career through her friendships with other poets, notably Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Published in 1989 following critic David Kalstone's death, with the help of a number of his friends and colleagues, it was greeted with uniformly enthusiastic praise. Hailed at that time as "one of the most sensitive appreciations of Elizabeth Bishop's genius ever composed" and "a first-rate piece of criticism" and "a masterpiece of understanding about friendship and about poetry," it has been largely unavailable in recent years.
320 pages, Paperback
First published November 3, 1989
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January 19, 2010"There is no 'split.' Dreams, works of art (some), glimpses of the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important. I can't believe we are wholly irrational--and I do admire Darwin! But reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic--and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration." -Elizabeth, after 30 years of working to reconcile the 'split'
September 23, 2024
A really beautiful book. How criticism ought to be done.
November 6, 2007
A great critical look at these relationships, and a good companion to Bishop's letters.
February 11, 2023
Another of those books I've had around for 35 years or so, and have just come to the right place to read it. Book was unfinished by the author who died young before he had a chance to complete it.
Close readings of Bishop's poems, with lengthy discussion of how Moore and Lowell and her relationships with both, shaped the poems and her approach to them. It is particularly helpful talking about Bishop's reliance on "description" and not on "narrative," until, of course, a couple of those incredible "stories" in the last book -- "In the Waiting Room" and"The Moose," for example.
The book is helped by a sense of her letters and of the biographies of all three, but none of that is absolutely necessary to enjoy the book. Kalstone allows entry and gives enough to get his readers through. Yeah, I don't suppose the book would mean much to anyone who has not spent a good deal of time with Bishop's poems, but if you have, the book is extremely helpful.
James Merrill wrote a final chapter after Kalstone had died, and he has one discussion in particular (Probably because I've been preparing to go to Amsterdam to see the big Vermeer retrospective -- 2023). Here's Merrill talking about Svetlana Alpers book "The Art of Describing" and noting how Kalstone found the book so helpful in his understanding of Bishop:
The Dutch manner "will appeal to women"--a slur attributed to Michelangelo. Indeed, Bishop was Dutch in her love of curiosities locatable in time and place ... of genre scenes ... or single figures at their daily tasks ... of microscopic close-ups and lucid distances ... of maps, which, as Alpers puts it, show us "not land possessed but land known in certain respects". That's great, not only as a reading of Bishop, but as a way of understanding Vermeer!
Close readings of Bishop's poems, with lengthy discussion of how Moore and Lowell and her relationships with both, shaped the poems and her approach to them. It is particularly helpful talking about Bishop's reliance on "description" and not on "narrative," until, of course, a couple of those incredible "stories" in the last book -- "In the Waiting Room" and"The Moose," for example.
The book is helped by a sense of her letters and of the biographies of all three, but none of that is absolutely necessary to enjoy the book. Kalstone allows entry and gives enough to get his readers through. Yeah, I don't suppose the book would mean much to anyone who has not spent a good deal of time with Bishop's poems, but if you have, the book is extremely helpful.
James Merrill wrote a final chapter after Kalstone had died, and he has one discussion in particular (Probably because I've been preparing to go to Amsterdam to see the big Vermeer retrospective -- 2023). Here's Merrill talking about Svetlana Alpers book "The Art of Describing" and noting how Kalstone found the book so helpful in his understanding of Bishop:
The Dutch manner "will appeal to women"--a slur attributed to Michelangelo. Indeed, Bishop was Dutch in her love of curiosities locatable in time and place ... of genre scenes ... or single figures at their daily tasks ... of microscopic close-ups and lucid distances ... of maps, which, as Alpers puts it, show us "not land possessed but land known in certain respects". That's great, not only as a reading of Bishop, but as a way of understanding Vermeer!
December 24, 2025
i aspire to have a lowell / bishop relationship
March 30, 2015
The second half of the book focuses on Bishop's relationship with Lowell and the impact on their work, fascinating, and enlightening!
November 19, 2020
A very satisfying read about Bishop's relationships with her two most important mentors.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews