SOURCE: Xiaojing, Zhou. “‘The Oblique, the Indirect Approach’: Elizabeth Bishop's ‘Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics.’” Chicago Review 40, no. 4 (fall 1994): 75-93.

In the following essay, Xiaojing argues that “Rainy Season; SubTropics” contains essential clues to Bishop's poetics.

Elizabeth Bishop's prose poem, “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics,” though one of her least commented-on works, contains important articulations by Bishop about herself as a poet, and about her poetic principles and practice.¹ At the same time, its three monologues are relentless and revealing investigations of multifaceted subjectivity as captured in diverse voices through three animal personae. Both the form and content of these monologues are at once an assimilation of and a resistance to the confessional practice in American poetry.

“Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics” first appeared in Kenyon Review in November, 1967 as a response to what Bishop saw as the excesses of confessional poetry. Earlier in the year, Bishop commented on confessional poets' work in Time...