Description

From the mid-1930s to 1978 Elizabeth Bishop published some eighty poems and thirty translations. Yet her notebooks reveal that she embarked upon many more compositions, some existing in only fragmentary form but many embodied in extensive drafts. "Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke-Box" presents, alongside a facsimile of the notebook page from which they are drawn, poems Bishop began soon after college, reflecting her passion for Elizabethan verse and surrealist technique; love poems and dream fragments from the 1940s; poems about her Canadian childhood; and many other works that have heretofore been quoted almost exclusively in biographical and critical studies. This revelatory and moving selection brings us into the poet's laboratory, showing us the initial provocative images that moved her to begin a poem, illustrating terrain unexplored in the work published during her lifetime, and revealing the kind of artistic resolution required for her to keep a poem, sometimes for many years, in mindful abeyance.