SOURCE: Palattella, John. “‘That Sense of Constant Re-Adjustment’: The Great Depression and the Provisional Politics of Elizabeth Bishop's North & South.” Contemporary Literature 34, no. 1 (spring 1993): 18-43.

In the following essay, Palattella analyzes the political elements of North & South.

In January 1946, concerned about the political nontopicality of her forthcoming North & South, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her publisher Houghton Mifflin, “The fact that none of these poems deal directly with the war, at a time when so much war poetry is being published, will, I am afraid, leave me open to reproach.”¹ Bishop's apparent humility ironically masks an acute understanding of how during the war the poetry establishment's dominant notions of “political experience” could sanction the social value of a poet's work: poetry that directly addresses wartime events is political, whereas poetry situated on the home front, like Bishop's well-known “Roosters,” for example, is undeniably unpolitical or at least privileged with...