Landscapes, Animals and Human Beings: Elizabeth Bishop's Poetry and Ecocentrism

Elizabeth Bishop's poetry is characterized by a deep gaze at the landscapes, containing animals and human beings - i.e. the vivid actuality of the earth as a biosphere, rather than anthropocentric absorption in idealism, logos or ideologies of human society. Although deviating from contemporary confessional poets, Bishop might be ranked among American nature writers due to her attachment to nature. Symptomatic of modern American nature writings, Bishop foregrounds nature; in Bishop's poetry nature is not an ornamental background upon which human dramas are played. Detailed facts of a natural scene or animals themselves often constitute the main texture of Bishop's poems, while human wills become insignificant. Critics describe these qualities of Bishop as reticence, impersonality or painters' craft. In this essay I seek to relate these characteristics of Bishop to an ecocentric worldview in terms of deep ecology. An ecocentric vision is seen in Bishop's poetry, in which other creatures register autonomy, while man is a mere component rather than dominant protagonist of the landscapes. Bishop's poetics illustrates an interactive egalitarianism, rather than sterile, hierarchical relationship between man and nature. Instead of the alienation resulting from authoritarian imposition of anthropocentrism, a reciprocal relationship between man and nature is brought about by Bishop's selfless stance of mutual esteem. Thus, in Bishop's scenes, there is a higher harmony, in which human consciousness ceases trying to give order to but surrenders itself to nature. Bishop's poetry evokes the reader's innocent, wholesome kinship to the land and other creatures of the earth, although the inherent link between man and nature may not be retrieved