TS Heavyish Hitters UK v US mid-20th Century Edition: Elizabeth Bishop v Philip Larkin

Hope it's not too much of a troll poll. I know people who'd be screaming that Larkin is not even a poet if asked to compare these two, but that's sort of why it interests me: putting the most popular UK post-war poet up against a poet's poet.

I adore them both, and Bishop and Larkin share more philosophically than one might think at first glance. But Bishop's magical eye, superb ear, and generosity >> Larkin.

In my experience students get Bishop and Larkin. For a couple of years I would begin every lit class with a reading of "High Windows."

embarrassed to admit never having heard of bishop. Love larkin, one of very few poets i'd sit down and actually read.

I lean Larkin myself. I do like the directness, the straight saying-something hooks that he offers, and put off some poetry hedz -'why aren't they screaming?', 'nothing, like something, happens anywhere', 'Life is first boredom, then fear', all of This Be The Verse, etc etc - but then the real heart of it is his facility with the romantic image, the burst into something else (so the end of 'High Windows') - and those slender poems where he isn't growling, like Solar or Cut Grass (an amazing lyric, something c17th about it).

Bishop doesn't quite have the immediate thrill that Larkin gives me, and can't match him on personal resonance (gloomy child of the English Midlands), but I read her more now; her eye, yes, Larkin can't match that - the super-focus and knack for a descriptive image.

You're right, they do share more than it seems at first; hadn't really thought about that till now.

Larkin for the music. I can't hear Bishop.

Really?

I like her ear mostly, especially in the plainer moments, carrying thoughts over lines, but find it a bit awkward when it picks up speed, or goes for broader effects or rhyming tightly - 'The Burglar of Babylon', say. Effect seems deliberate & unsettling in 'Pink Dog'.

Read a poem called "The Shampoo."

not even gonna blink before voting Bishop and I've only seen that poem about the fish

xp

Haha yeah, I think I might be blanking on a few things in saying that, but a lot of my favourites - A Weed, The Monument - depend on fairly low-key rhythm effects, and the ones that don't work stick in my mind a bit.

Oh boy! I will have to reread both of them now, so I can drag myself reluctantly to choosing one over the other.

there's a really good reading of bishop's 'one art' in michael wood's empson lectures.

(some stuff here too)

:D Phil 'Silvers' Larkin

AND THEN THE ONLY END OF AGE

PLAIN AS A WARDROBE

can't read "Aubade" without crying and going to bits for half a day

cheer up, aubade could it be

I work 'all' day, and get 'half' drunk at night

I do like both very much, but for me Larkin wins this easily.

I admire more than like Bishop. She's sort of hard and glittery. But that's not why.

The best answer I've got is that I don't like her dryness and hedging (and interruption of the flow). Also I don't much like -- her exclamations!

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Questions, I think, maybe. That poem is very hedged. I find it uncomfortable.

I imagine Bishop writing Stevens: "There is a project for the sun -- is there? / (At least, possibly there is)."

I also have difficulty with her privacy and domesticity. The poem A,LS linked to has huge technique, but it is very private. I feel like I'm reading a letter to a friend. (And -- are there more questions? Perhaps.)

When she just lets it run, as in "The Fish", I'm a believer. Some lines of "Visits to St Elizabeths" hit me like Larkin. Part 3 of "Songs for a Colored Singer" is just breathtaking.

Larkin's sour lyricism (not a dismissal) is modish in ways that Bishop's modesty is not.

can't read "Aubade" without crying and going to bits for half a day

OTM.

larkin's my favorite poet, probably, but i should read some bishop before voting, to be fair.

I don't value English male defeat over expatriate lesbian poise, and the two have comparable technique. But Bishop observes out of a domestic calm that I don't possess. (Poems to her cat, or about a cookbook.) She has time to puzzle things out in her poetry. Larkin's failure and remorse are as real to me as this table. So he's speaking to me directly while I'm overhearing Bishop from outside.

I don't detect Bishop's lesbianism in her poetry. James Merrill (whom I love even more than Bishop) was more "out" in verse.

While thinking this over I realized that I like Merrill even though he does everything I complained about in Bishop. I am not independently wealthy, nor gay, nor a witty conversationalist, but somehow I feel at least invited to his endless party for a few close friends. Maybe it's because I came to Merrill via Sandover.

So, wait, do you insist on autobiographical connections between you and the poet? Just curious.

I don't detect Bishop's lesbianism in her poetry.

When I (as a man) encounter that cool self-sufficiency and reserve, an exotic or unconventional life track, and an utter absence of spousal or parental angst, in real life, I tend to assume it. I don't see it in the technique at all.

So, wait, do you insist on autobiographical connections between you and the poet? Just curious.

Aha, an excuse to introspect.

Not that sort of connection, but... an emotional urgency about something, that I can feel too. Technique alone isn't enough. Neither Merrill nor Bishop betray a lot of that in their lyrical work.

If there were a lesbian Larkin, I assume her poems would hit me about the same. (In a completely different realm of writing, "James Tiptree Jr." had me crying when I was young.)

The puzzle was that I don't have anything autobiographical in common with Bishop, nor with Merrill, but for some reason I'm impatient with one for what I don't mind in the other. So the lack of shared autobiography can't explain it.

Your link was what started me on this -- the doublings in that poem were highly crafted, but I couldn't locate the reason why she was writing it. Hence the feeling that it was a letter to a friend, or Helen Vendler, who would know. (With "The Fish", everyone knows at the end.) That's what I meant about privacy.

So, Merrill and Bishop don't betray much of what is fueling the poem, yet with Merrill I don't feel so shut out. They are both private and domestic and write from a calm, ordered center, but with Merrill I feel invited in. Was it because of Sandover? Maybe after reading an irresistible tale about communicating with Auden and Stevens and magic birds in the afterlife, I felt familiarized enough that I could handle his lyrical poems.

And then in later life Merrill can write poems like "Family Week At Oracle Ranch", which Bishop never, ever would. A poem like that I could take direct.

We need a Merrill thread at some point.

I don't quite, alimosina, but that's lovely! Thanks.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

If there were a lesbian Larkin,

haha/this could be one of his & kingsley amis' twisted riffs in their letters

thanks to this thread I will try to remedy my unfamiliarity w/Elizabeth Bishop

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I forgot to vote.

Belatedness is Larkinesque, so in effect another vote for him.

Belatedness is Larkinesque,

Marianne Moore?

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was just too late for me)

Don't get the Moore association, but I don't know Moore well.

this poll ended on
wednesday in troth
(which was rather early for alf) -
somewhere around the end of whiney's ban
and telling the beatles on itunes to fuck off.