Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments

Excerpted fromEdgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Boxby Elizabeth Bishop Copyright 2006 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Published in March 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. Introduction To visit the Department of Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries, and explore the abundance of Elizabeth Bishop material is to enter a universe of fascinating proportions. In the boxes that preserve more than thirty-five hundred pages of Bishop's writing are brief, indelible character sketches. ("Loved the wrong person all his life / lived in the wrong place / maybe even read the wrong books"), bits of overheard dialogue she found irresistible, notes for stories, commentary on poetry she revered (by Herbert, Hopkins, Stevens, and Moore, particularly), wholly arresting, distinctly characteristic bits of description ("the bureau trapped in the moon-light, like a creature saying 'oh' "; "Begonias ghostly in a galvanized bucket"), accounts of dreams, drawings, menus, shopping lists, and hosts of fascinating remarks on the art of poetry, as well as the occasional withering comment on a poem, an essay, or a literary attitude or viewpoint she deplored. Of Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate of England and friend to Hopkins, for instance, she writes, "The reasonableness of all his ideas is too muchnot a touch of the fanatical. He seems to have made himself into a poet out of wisdomafter deciding, sensibly, it was the best profession life had to offer him." There are alsoespecially in her notebooks from the 1930s and '40s, when she was often desperately uncertain about the direction of her work and her lifeanguishedcris de coeur, indicating how much courage and bedrock stamina her survival entailed. Many of the titles set down in the notebooks are referred to just once, including early groups with marvelous descriptive tags indicating Bishop's ideas for them. Her post-college journal, which she began on the island of Cuttyhunk off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in July 1934, lists the following on one page: " 'The Citrus Fruit'love & friendship, 'The Emblem in the Eye'6 sonnets, 'Flags and Banners'motion in dreams, and 'An Individual Island for Everyone' (breakfast foods, etc.satire)." And there are innumerable fragments and drafts of poems, work that she did not complete to her satisfaction or considered trifling; drafts with phrases that haunted her, showing up again and again in her notebooks over the course of years; drafts with lines written out in a rush but accompanied by a chosen rhyme scheme; fragments that showcase verbal gestures familiar to Bishop readers from the more successful resolution of those gestures in the poems we knowall of it work that for one reason or another she chose not to publish but did not destroy. Thinking about poetry in the highest terms was instinctive for Bishop and meeting her own standards was almost impossible, and this may account for the extraordinary quality of her unpublished work. In a letter to Marianne Moore dated December 5, 1936, the twenty-five-year-old Bishop discusses her reaction to the new book by Wallace Stevens,Owl's Clover, making clear how deeply she is pondering what poetry can and ought to do: "What strikes me as so wonderful about the whole bookbecause I dislike the way he occasionally seems to make blank versemoois that it is such a display of ideas at workmaking poetry, the poetry making them, etc. That, it seems to me, is the way a poet should think." In another earlBishop, Elizabeth is the author of 'Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments', published 2006 under ISBN 9780374146450 and ISBN 0374146454.