"매혹적인 모순"

"Fascinating Incongruities": Elizabeth Bishop's Spiritual Poetics (1)

Elizabeth Bishop's relationship to Christianity has been regarded as ambivalent, sometimes vexed. This essay explores the undercurrent of religious, spiritual musings in Bishop's poems and proposes that her spiritual poems, in the form of "fascinating incongruities," successfully pose religious and ethical questions in her/our time. Challenging the recent academic practice on the relationship between Bishop and religion, I will go further into attempting a playful reading of "The Prodigal" and "One Art" as the intersection of secularity and spirituality. How did Bishop confront the values embedded in the tradition of Christian allegory, how did she wrestle with the status of homelessness in her poems, how did she contemplate and describe the human condition of 'being lost'? Following these questions, the intangible connection between alcohol and poetic imagination, between loss and writing can also be noted. Above all, I argue that Bishop's spiritual wanderings presented in these two 'overtly and covertly' religious poems without the presence of God are, in fact, the sign of ethical responsibility to her life as a poet. And I call her spiritual response to the status of 'being lost' as 'po-ethica.'