Gay & Lesbian Themes (Critical Survey of Poetry, Fourth by Rosemary Canfield Reisman

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It may also suggest such other Bishop poems as “Cape Breton,” where the birds turn their backs to the mainland, sometimes falling off the cliffs onto rocks below. Bishop does share with Frost his absorption by nature and its ambiguities, the ironic tone, and the tight poetic form that masks the “controlled panic” that the sandpiper-poet feels. Frost, 32 Gay and Lesbian Themes Bishop, Elizabeth however, is in a darker line of American writers: His emphasis is on the transitoriness of the vision, the shallowness of the sea into which one gazes, the ease with which even the most fleeting vision is erased.

The next four lines describe the nativity scene, but while the details are familiar enough, Bishop’s language defamiliarizes them. The poet ends with the statement that had she been there she would have “looked and looked our infant sight away”—another pun rich with possibilities. Is it that she would have looked repeatedly, so that the scene would have yielded meaning and she could have left satisfied? Do the lines mean to look away, as if the fire that breaks in the vision is too strong for human sight?

In 1926, a collection of his poetry, White Buildings, was published. Crane’s stormy family life continued. In 1928, in California, after helping to nurse his sick grandmother, Crane had a final quarrel with his mother, Grace, and they never saw each other again. Shortly thereafter, Crane received a legacy from his grandmother Hart’s estate, and he traveled to London and Paris. There he met Harry and Caresse Crosby, who offered to publish The Bridge in a special edition. In 1930 in Paris and then in New York, The Bridge was published.