세스티나의 강박적 구조와 마술적 미학

The Sestina’s Obsessive Formality and Magical Aesthetics: A Reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s Sestinas

This paper investigates the poems of Elizabeth Bishop written in the sestina form and discusses how she uses the sestina's obsessive formal logic to construct fascinatingly surreal and deeply emotional landscapes. To contextualize Bishop’s sestinas and demonstrate their unique significance, this paper will first offer a brief overview of the sestina form’s adoption and adaptation in the English poetic tradition. Bishop’s first sestina, “A Miracle for Breakfast,” is influenced by Auden’s moralized and allegorical re-interpretation of the troubadour form that originated in medieval France. Furthermore, Bishop, whose childhood struggles with a sense of dislocation, alienation, and mortality lie at the heart of her poetic universe, naturally gravitates toward the form’s intensely affective and strikingly magical force in her tour-de-force poem, “Sestina.” Through the close reading of Bishop’s two sestinas, this paper will argue that Bishop offers paradigmatic models to understand the sestina's formal virtue and enriched potential for exploration, articulation, and expression in the context of twentieth-century American poetry.