Ashbery's UNTILTED
The influence that Elizabeth Bishop's poetry has had on the poetry of John Ashbery has been widely cited. 1 Ashbery himself remarked that he "read, reread, studied and absorbed" Bishop (Shoptaw 29). In Ashbery's poem "Untilted," written only a month before Bishop's death, the speaker makes an appeal to Bishop. 2 By alluding to her early poem "The Man-Moth" and drawing on common motifs in Bishop's poetry, the speaker reveals an empathy for her unwillingness to go public with her homosexuality. Pressured by the prejudices of the 1940s and 1950s, Bishop would never write about her lesbianism, except through veiled references in her poetry that work as maps to the marginalized life of the homosexual poet. Vernon Shelty comments on Bishop's tendency to hold back: "Reticence and silence seem to have come naturally to her, but that innate bias must have been powerfully reinforced by the need for certain kinds of secrecy in her emotional life. . . . the climate of hostility to homosexuality throughout most of Bishop's lifetime thwarted the development of what might have been a remarkable love poet" (24). 3 Shelty makes a connection between Bishop and Ashbery through this secrecy, stating that like Bishop, "Ashbery seemed destined to be a love poet, but he found his way blocked by the imperative of secrecy surrounding the love he would have taken as his subject" (25). Unable to openly address issues of his own sexuality, Ashbery empathizes with Bishop's silence. By the end of "Untilted," however, focusing on the "cradled," "pure" but painful "tear"--a legacy from Bishop's poem "The Man-Moth"--the speaker appeals to Bishop, and to himself, to let go of fear. 4
As John Shoptaw has pointed out, "Untilted" begins with ...
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... morning" (83). The speaker of Ashbery's poem desires the same release for Bishop, as well as for himself.
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While he wasn't a published writer until he was older, Ashbery used writing to help him through life. "Ashbery's practical need to disguise his homosexuality led him to cultivate his taste for ambiguity and indirection" (Kindley 4). From an early age, Ashbery struggled with the fact that he was not normal. His sexuality caused internal strife and confusion, and his escape was to write. As he wrote, he could be whoever he wanted to be, writing about whatever he wanted to write about. Writing was Ashbery's escape. Even from a young age, Ashbery's writings were filled with misdirection and an orderly sense of chaos. This was his way of expressing the millions of thoughts rambling through his head. Even to the most trained eye, Ashbery's use of conversation pieces set his writings apart. Daniel Kane, who interviewed Ashbery, focuses on the writing technique of Ashbery's poems and how it directly relates to diverse ideas. In order to gain clarity, Kane delved deep into the meanings of lines within Ashbery's writing. "I frequently incorporate overheard speech", said Ashbery in the interview, "much of which obviously doesn't make very much sense when overheard…[it] obviously makes a lot of sense to the people who are talking…[it has a] special meaning for them" (Kane 2). Ashbery recognizes that his poetry is what sets his apart. His unique poetry technique allows for the poetry to be interpreted in a way that personally
The poems “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (Marlowe), “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” (Raleigh), and “Song” (Lewis ) all focus on the same basic plot and characters but vary considerably in point of view and theme. This difference comes primarily through the difference in the poems’ speakers. A poor shepherd is the voice of both “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” and “Song.” However, the shepherds of the two poems feature almost opposite attitudes.
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The life of Elizabeth Bishop commences and ends with sorrow, heartbreak, and tragedy. Promptly after she was ripped away from her mentally unstable mother, Bishop was silently stamped as an outsider set to wander a path of outcasts until her dying days. Thus she interlaced her life themes of grief, the struggle to belong, and trauma into her poems through imagery and by doing so, audiences and fanatics of Bishop are still enchanted with her works today. Momentous feelings such as anxiety, identity crisis, empathy, courage, and sacrifice are of the inner self-psyche and cause immense or overwhelming feelings of pride or sorrow. Bishop plays with these feelings in her poem “The Fish” through the use of repetition and of imagery throughout the poem.
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