Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic

Vidyan Ravinthiran

2015
250 pages
ISBN 9781611486810

Elizabeth Bishop is now recognized as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century - a uniquely cosmopolitan writer with connections to the US, Canada, Brazil, and also the UK, given her neglected borrowings from many English authors, and her strong influence on modern British verse. Yet the dominant biographical/psychoanalytical approach leaves her style relatively untouched - and it is vital that an increasing focus on archival material does not replace our attention to the writing itself. Bishop's verse is often compared with prose (sometimes insultingly); writing fiction, she worried she was really writing poems. But what truly is the difference between poetry and prose - structurally, conceptually, historically speaking? Is prose simply formalized speech, or does it have rhythms of its own? Ravinthiran seeks an answer to this question through close analysis of Bishop's prose-like verse, her literary prose, her prose poems, and her letter prose. This title is a provocation. It demands that we reconsider the pejorative quality of the word prosaic; playing on mosaic, Ravinthiran uses Bishop's thinking about prose to approach - for the first time - her work in multiple genres as a stylistic whole.

Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic is concerned not only with her inimitable style, but also larger questions to do with the Anglo-American shift from closed to open forms in the twentieth century. This study identifies not just borrowings from, but rich intertextual relationships with, writers as diverse as - among others - Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, and Dorothy Richardson. (Though Bishop criticized Woolf, she in particular is treated as a central and thus far neglected precursor, crucial to our understanding of Bishop as a feminist poet.) Finally, the sustained discussion of how the history of prose frames effects of rhythm, syntax, and acoustic texture - in both Bishop's prose proper and her prosaic verse - extends a body of research which seeks now to treat literature as a form of cognition. Technique and thought are finely wedded in Bishop's work - her literary forms evince a historical intelligence attuned to questions of power, nationality, tradition (both literary and otherwise), race, and gender.

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Reviews

"Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic represents a compelling and fundamental breakthrough in Elizabeth Bishop scholarship as well as in the study of literary genre.... This book is highly ambitious in its rendering of Bishop's nuanced poetics and prosaic style. The book is beautifully written, informed not just by Bishop critics but also by important and neglected poetry critics of the last 100 years.... The book will be a building block for further studies of Bishop's prose rhythms, and her innovative poetics in the ongoing evolution of poetry. Scholars and poets will delight on hundreds of pithy observations, fresh readings and analyses."
- Angus Cleghorn, Seneca College and Jonathan Ellis, Sheffield University; Elizabeth Bishop Society; Vol. 2, No. 1; (Fall 2015)

"Ravinthiran brings his poetic acuity to bear in close readings of a wide range of Bishop's poems and prose poems alongside a literary history of prose aesthetics, animating a worthy mode of analysis. He also extends his critique to Bishop's letters and literary prose, providing a revelatory way of reading Bishop across genres . . . Building upon several decades of scholarship and accelerating interest in Bishop's poetry and prose, . . . [Ravinthiran] characterize[s] Bishop's dialectical style - her mixture of genres and geographic imaginaries as she reckoned with 'life and the memory of it so compressed / they've turned into each other.'"
-Heather Treseler, Worcester State University; Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature (37.1), May 2018

About the author:

Vidyan Ravinthiran completed his DPhil at Balliol College, Oxford in 2010, after which he joined Selwyn College, Cambridge as the Keasbey Research Fellow in American Studies; he began teaching at Durham in 2014. Ranging from the Long Eighteenth Century to the present day, he has a strong interest in the formal qualities of both verse and prose, and how they relate to history and thought. Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic is published this year by Bucknell University Press; his next research project is transatlantic and concerns 'spontaneity and form' in nineteenth and twentieth-century English and American prose.

His first book of verse, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe, 2014), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for First Full Collection, and has also been shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2015. His poems have also appeared in several anthologies, as a pamphlet, and in a range of newspapers and magazines which include The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times, The Financial Times and Poetry Review; 'Snow', a Guardian poem-of-the-week, can be read online here.

His reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the TLS, PN Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Review, Poetry, The Caravan, and Poetry London - of over thirty pieces of journalism, selected essays are listed below - and he is currently working on a second book of verse, and also a novel.

He co-edits, with Sarah Howe and Dai George, the online magazine of poetry and poetics, Prac Crit.

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Paperback: 9781611486827; eBook: 9781611486827