It isn’t often that publication of a book of poems is the catalyst for widespread debate in the popular press, but the publication of “Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke Box,” a collection of posthumous poems written by the iconic poet Elizabeth Bishop has proved to be the exception.
Bishop, who died in 1979, won the Pulitzer Prize for her work and served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. She taught at Harvard and published much of her work in The New Yorker. The new collection, edited by Alice Quinn, poetry editor of that magazine, has provoked outrage, however, from, among others, Helen Vendler, probably the most respected and influential poetry critic in America.
Writing in the New Republic, Vendler, said, “This book should not have been issued with its present subtitle of ‘Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments.’ It should have been called ‘Repudiated Poems.’ For Elizabeth Bishop had years to publish the poems included here, had she wanted to publish them. They remained unpublished (not “uncollected”) because, for the most part, they did not meet her fastidious standards. Students eagerly wanting to buy ‘the new book by Elizabeth Bishop’ should be told to go back and buy the old one, where the poet represents herself as she wished to be known.”
Vendler goes on to say that poets who wish to preserve the sanctity of their work should burn their poems before they die to save them from the likes of Quinn. This might be a bit extreme and of course other volumes of Bishop’s work have been published since her death, including “Collected Poems” in 1984 and “One Art,” letters issued in 1994. To be fair, Vendler’s concern is not just the publication of Bishop’s work but the manner in which the poems and drafts are presented. But the Bishop brouhaha might have faded quickly had The New York Times and other publications not fastened on the issue and fueled it by quoting other poets pro and con.
The argument essentially is whether the way a writer “wishes to be known” should be restrictive on publishers after his or her death. That is, are readers of a writer’s apparent discards merely picking over his or her bones out of ghoulish curiosity or is everything an important writer does of legitimate interest to the scholarly and poetic worlds?
Bin Ramke, a former Yale Younger Poets winner and professor at the University of Denver, says, “The more I’ve thought about the new Bishop work the more intrigued I am, actually. While I do think she wrote some very nice poems, I guess I am not ready to deify her. Something about the popularization of a few figures, the selection of one or two for the general audience to learn about and then the ignoring of dozens of equally interesting figures, is annoying. The process of making poems and the reasons for making them are ultimately more interesting, and more important, than the poems themselves. Bishop has long been a sort of model of the finished, cleaned-up brand of poet, so it is a new perspective this work gives us. And having the discards and the rejects doesn’t mean we can’t go back and look at the versions she gave us during her lifetime – nothing is ultimately lost, and surely something is gained.”
No one, including Vendler, objects to work, including drafts and notebooks, being maintained in archives out of the public eye. The controversy focuses on whether such artifacts should be issued in trade editions as finished poems, as Bishop’s work has been.
James Nelson, emeritus professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, is all for publication. “I think Vendler is definitely wrong in her views about the publication of posthumous poetry,” Nelson says. “She does not seem to take into account the fact that sometimes poets die before they can publish their work or perhaps have second thoughts about those they have chosen not to publish. She does surely know that so much of literature which is important in rounding out an author’s career would have been (and has been) lost if someone did not publish it. Practically none of Dickinson’s poetry would be extant today if her sister some years after her death had not published it. Vendler seems to assume that all posthumous writings are bad and not worth ever reaching the public. Even great critics like Vendler can sometimes be off the mark and so I think she is in this matter.”
Nelson is certainly right about Dickinson – and there are others. The work of Gerard Manley Hopkins never would have reached the reading public had not Robert Bridges, then poet laureate of the United Kingdom, championed Hopkins’ work in 1918, 25 years after his death. Similarly, works by artists as dissimilar as Keats, Aubrey Beardsley and Kafka would have remained unknown had publishers slavishly respected the wishes of these authors to leave their work unpublished after death.
Not that everything published posthumously is of equal value – or interest. One thinks of T.S. Eliot’s juvenile poetry and some of the stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald that would have been better left in the literary scrap heap.
But back to Bishop. Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and himself the editor of a marvelous posthumous collection of Eugenio Montale’s poems, wrote in a letter to The New Republic, responding to Vendler’s attack: “This is a book about the processes of creativity, about how a great writer worked; our aim was in no way to present these texts as canonical, but to let her many passionate readers – not only scholars, but anyone for whom Bishop’s poetry is meaningful – learn more about how she wrote.”
The argument is unlikely to be settled anytime soon and Bishop is only the latest poet whose reputation has grown posthumously. Sylvia Plath, to name just one, has become a literary superstar since her suicide, as much because of her troubled marriage to Ted Hughes as because of close reading of her work. And any number of workshop poets have been known to claim hopefully that they’ll only be appreciated after their deaths. No harm done in that kind of an illusion and, who knows, it may help some who have difficulty finding acceptance in this world. More power to them.
At the least, it’s refreshing to see poetry featured in the pages of our leading newspapers, even if it’s for the wrong reasons. As Ramke notes, “I still find it annoying that the only reason the book got any attention from The New York Times is because there was controversy. The article seems designed from the first sentence to make ‘the insular world of poetry’ look trivial. It’s a textbook example of ill-informed and parochial cultural reporting.”
Still on the subject of poetry in the lee of National Poetry Month, Poets & Writers magazine has announced the establishment of a major new honor, the Jackson Prize, which will award $50,000 to an “early to mid-career poet in order to provide what all poets need – time and the encouragement to write.”
Amen to that. Unfortunately, for all the hopefuls out there, there’s no application process, and nominations will be confidential. So save your postage. Just stay home and wait for the phone to ring.
