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The Poetics of Indirection: A Study of Elizabeth Bishop’s War Poems

Elizabeth Bishop was labelled as an “apolitical poet” before feminism and new historicism in the 1980s put her poetry into concrete social, cultural, and political contexts. The so-called “Elizabeth Bishop Pheomenon,” flourished after her death in 1979, also inspired a renewed attention to war poems of Bishop who had lived through two world wars and Cold War era. This study aims to look into Bishop’s war poems to prove how she has opened a new horizon of war poetry beyond those of male combattant poets such as Owen, Jarrell, and Eberhart. Bishop does not deal with war on the basis of direct experiences of war: rather she applies an indirect way of expressing the misery and predicament human beings suffer in the war. “The Armadillo,” one of her best-known poems, uses a form of fable to show how defenselessly civilians are exposed to the dangers of war. The owls, rabbit, and armadillo in this poem mimic the sufferings of innocent people who could not protect themselves from the violence of air bombing. In “Roosters” Bishop also uses animals to “emphasize the baseness of militarism” propelled by human beings, especially arrogant males. Set on Key West, Florida, the poem blurs the boundary between battlefields and civilian areas to suggest that all are influenced by the terrors of war no matter how far they live away from war zones. Two poems associated with Bishop’s experiences in Washington DC as a Poetry Consultant in the Library of Congress reveal her uneasy feelings about the US in Cold War era in an indirect and covert way. “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” thinly conceals her fear of McCarthy’s witch-hunting and military expansionism represented by the “hard and loud” play of “the Air Force Band.” Using the form of dramatic monologue in “From Trollope’s Journal,” Bishop also covertly criticizes the social and political maladies of the US under President Eisenhower who, as a war hero, is building up the military power of the nation in preparation for the Cold War.