Sherry Chandler

Repudiated Poems

In March of this year, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a posthumous Elizabeth Bishop collection with the intriguing title Edgar Allen Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments. The collection was edited by The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Alice Quinn. The title poem is one that Bishop had intended to use in her second collection but in the end had left out — a repudiated poem.

Clearing out the backlog in my mailbox, I found that I had been saving this Helen Vendler review from The New Republic. According to Vendler:

This book should not have been issued with its present subtitle of “Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments.” It should have been called “Repudiated Poems.” For Elizabeth Bishop had years to publish the poems included here, had she wanted to publish them. They remained unpublished (not “uncollected”) because, for the most part, they did not meet her fastidious standards (although a few, such as the completed love poem “It is marvellous to wake up together,” may have been withheld out of prudence). Students eagerly wanting to buy “the new book by Elizabeth Bishop” should be told to go back and buy the old one, where the poet represents herself as she wished to be known. The eighty-odd poems that this famous perfectionist allowed to be printed over the years are “Elizabeth Bishop” as a poet. This book is not.

Is everything a poet writes up for grabs after his/her death? Or should a poet burn everything as Gerard Manley Hopkins did. Well no, I mis-state that. Hopkins didn’t burn things himself. He asked his heirs to burn them and they complied. Other writers have not been so lucky. Is that ill-luck for writers, then, posterity’s good luck? I think, in saving this essay, I must have intended to raise these questions here.

Vendler, a scholar herself and therefore one who must respect the archiving of papers, doesn’t seem to object to the publication of these pieces so much as to their being presented as full-blown Elizabeth Bishop poems when they are just a hodge-podge of juvenilia and unfinished or unsuccessful attempts sprinkled with a few good poems.

So, is Alice Quinn exploiting Elizabeth Bishop? Or is it that Vendler wants these papers reserved for exploitation by scholars? Or does it matter. I’m pretty sure the book won’t sell like The DaVinci Code in any case. Amazon ranks it at 25,865.

Possibly related posts:

The Farmgirl Poems

Vendler on Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery

Good Poems

Memorizing poems

Seamus Heaney Interview

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.