This chapter begins by arguing that debates about whether a poem can be translated reflect debates about the nature of the poem itself. Those who assert that poetry is untranslatable, for example, tend to believe that every poem is a unique event in a specific language. Conversely, those who assert the importance of translation tend to see poems as existing, and as having their meanings, only in relation to other poems or art forms. Considering examples from Roy Fisher, Friedrich Hölderlin, Vittorio Sereni, Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo, César Vallejo, Donald Justice, Elizabeth Bishop, and Frank O’Hara, the chapter demonstrates that in practice, both these conceptual positions are essential. It explores how the practice of translation generates networks of mutually referential identities over time, and it suggests that, more broadly, the emergence of the abstraction known as “the poem” depends on its relation to such interconnections between poems, poets, and translations, ones that may be shaped by imitation, parody, homage, and adaptation.

Given the extent to which queer writers have played starring roles in most of what we think about when we think about the representative movements and innovations of modern American poetry, this chapter takes up the question of the association between poetry and queerness, asking how the aesthetic invention that characterizes modern American poetry might be related to the expressive capacities of sexuality. My limited and speculative response to this question focuses on how poets, and particular poems, have exploited the queer affordances of the lyric genre. The historical rhyme between the “queer” and the “poet” across the first half of the twentieth century evinces how the uneasy consolidation of aberrant sexual practices into modern homosexual identity coincides with the uneasy consolidation of poetry, in all its diversity, into a particular understanding of the lyric. If the twentieth century presents the gradual conflation of poetry and lyric, modern queer poets found in the lyric’s shared set of expectations a means of living within the social and its reductive demands for visibility, intelligibility, and transparency, while still holding space for the strange or unknowable.

“Elizabeth Bishop” explores the close and lifelong personal and artistic relationship that sustained Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop from their first meeting in 1947 until Lowell’s death in 1977. Lowell dedicated his influential “Skunk Hour” to Bishop, and Bishop dedicated her own “The Armadillo” to Lowell. Bishop’s “North Haven” is widely considered the most eloquent of the many elegies addressed to Lowell. Over their thirty years of friendship, Lowell’s and Bishop’s lives became woven together in a vast and intricate web of words. This chapter explores their complex emotional bond, their influence on one another as poets, and the fluent exchange of correspondence, later published as Words in Air, that kept them going. The essay argues that in part through his friendship with Bishop, Lowell learned to master an art that, in the words of one of his poetic tributes to Bishop, could “make the casual perfect.”

This chapter discusses the poets associated with the so-called “Middle Generation,” a transitional group of writers who were younger than the modernists but older than the poets of the New American poetry discussed in Chapters 1–4. It addresses how the poets of this cohort struggled with the long shadow of their modernist predecessors and addresses their struggles with alcoholism, personal crises, and mental illness. The chapter charts their move away from the New Critical formalist mode that reigned at mid-century toward a looser, more personal mode, which eventually gave rise to Confessional poetry. Focusing especially on Elizabeth Bishop (who distanced herself from Confessionalism), Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, this chapter discusses the major stylistic and thematic features of Confessionalism, controversies surrounding this movement, and its profound influence on contemporary poetry.

The Epilogue moves forward to consider briefly selected poems from the twentieth century by T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and especially Louise Glück, who in her Nobel prize acceptance speech in December 2020 invoked an earlier tradition of poems that seem to invite the reader into secret conversations. These conversations are not, in fact, so secret, as Conversing in Verse has argued. The poems Glück cites (by Blake, Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot) include voices conversing under difficult conditions – as do her own poems, particularly in two collections, The Wild Iris and Meadowlands. There, as in the poetry that has been the subject of this study, misunderstandings and failed encounters are as frequent as successful ones. Handled with Glück’s ironic, witty self-awareness, they too are desperate conversations – with other people, with an impatient God, or with the nonhuman phenomena of the world. Poetry is after all sociable; it continues, against all odds, to converse.

“Bishop and Lyric” takes up the reception of Bishop’s work in the context of a history of lyricization and gendered poetics in the US. Bishop and writers of her generation rarely identified their work as “lyric,” yet both her critical detractors and fans have cast Bishop’s work as lyric’s exemplar, especially when discussing it in the terms of contemporary debates about poetics, politics, and the subject. After examining the different attachments and understandings of “lyric” in her own poetic culture and that which received her, I go on to ask, what, if anything, “lyric” meant and means to or for Bishop? Does her work resist the anachronistic lyricizing readings that have nevertheless helped to render her one of our “most beloved” “lyric” poets?

Although best known as a clear-eyed, realist poet of vivid, precise description, Elizabeth Bishop was powerfully drawn to surrealism, the avant-garde movement devoted to the unconscious, the irrational, and the power of dreams. This apparent contradiction is just one of the many paradoxes that make Bishop’s work and life so fascinating, but it is also one of the most significant and generative. This chapter argues that Bishop’s interest in surrealism is not merely a youthful enthusiasm that she definitively leaves behind. Surrealism struck a deep chord within her and remained a significant element of her poetic toolkit from beginning to end. Bishop’s poems are also not just influenced by surrealism, but in some ways are about it, thematically. She carries on a lifelong debate with surrealism and its implications, composing poems that probe fraught tensions between the unconscious and the conscious mind, between dream and waking, freedom and control.

The chapter examines literary translation as a fundamental part of Elizabeth Bishop’s creative effort and as a valuable context for the reading of her original works. It demonstrates how Bishop’s translations from several foreign languages (Ancient Greek, French, Portuguese, Spanish), which span a variety of genres (comedy, diary, short stories, lyric poetry, avant-garde prose poems, ballad, folk songs), and which she worked on throughout her career, relate to her own poetry’s topics, styles, poetic strategies, and language. Her views of translation are discussed in relation to her poetic principles, and it is suggested that translation as a creative stance exploring the complex interrelations between the foreign and the familiar is an essential principle underlying Bishop’s own poetics.