Geography III: Poems

"As I noted, I thought my list should have two volumes of poetry that allow you to enter not just a poet’s work but a poet’s world. The work of Elizabeth Bishop is its own world, that has its own mesmerizing power. She has become, for many American poets, the 20th-century progenitor. She is the person in the American poetry gene pool who manages to talk about feelings, including uncomfortable feelings, at the deepest registers. Her poetry is highly emotional, she shows a fidelity to experience, an honesty that is not exhibitionistic. Geography III was Elizabeth Bishop’s last book. There isn’t a poem in it that isn’t great. Women were cheap. A lot of early American women poets who published did so for very little money; they were happy to appear in print. So, there were economic reasons why American women were published. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that 18th-century poets like Phillis Wheatley and Anne Bradstreet and nineteenth century women, whose poems had been dismissed, were rediscovered. Before then, there was no gender parity among poets in the American canon."