This section contains 9,432 words (approx. 32 pages at 300 words per page) |
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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...
This section contains 9,432 words (approx. 32 pages at 300 words per page) |
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