`Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery'

We might call it The Bishop Test:

“The three qualities I admire in the poetry I like best are: Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery. My three `favorite’ poets – not the best poets, whom we all admire, but favorite in the sense of one’s `best friends,’ etc. are Herbert, Hopkins, and Baudelaire.”

That Elizabeth Bishop should befriend her favorites is typical. Friendship seems to have been her essential model for human relations. I’m reading the superb Library of America edition of her Poems, Prose, and Letters, which feels rather like renewing an old, sometimes neglected friendship. Like many readers, I valued her work but underestimated its true worth. Death often signals a plummet in literary reputation. Not so in Bishop’s case. In fact, an over-evaluation, rooted largely in politics and other extra-literary concerns, occurred. Today, almost 30 years after her death, she outshines most of her more highly touted contemporaries, in particular Robert Lowell. Her loyalty to Lowell is touching. Here’s what she said at his English memorial service in 1977:

“Our friendship, often kept alive through years of separation only by letters, remained constant and affectionate, and I shall always be deeply grateful for it.”

Of Randall Jarrell, her friend for 20 years, she writes: “He always seemed more alive than other people, as if constantly tuned up to the concert pitch that most people, including poets, can maintain only for short and fortunate stretches.”

A moving remembrance, one that sounds uncomfortably close to a diagnosis of manic depression. Bishop’s friendship with Flannery O’Connor was strictly epistolary. They exchanged letters for the final eight years of O’Connor’s life, and Bishop tells the story of how they once almost met when Bishop’s South America-bound freight stopped at Savannah, Ga. Bishop is forever saying she’s not a critic, yet she offers a succinct, generous and accurate assessment of O’Connor’s work:

“I am sure her few books will live on and on in American literature. They are narrow, possibly, but they are clear, hard, vivid, and full of bits of description, phrases, and odd insights that contain more real poetry than a dozen books of poems.”

Bishop’s trinity of literary qualities -- Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery – applies to her own work, of course, and even more acutely to O’Connor’s. Especially Mystery, her realm.