Causes for Excess: Elizabeth Bishop’s Eighty-Eight Exclamations

Abstract

Bishop begins her collected poems by calmly distancing her voice from “excitement/as when emotion too far exceeds its cause”; ever since, nearly every review singles out her reticence and her careful measuring of emotion to cause. Yet no list of her most distinctive lines would be complete without her startling exclamations, lines that condense epiphanies and voltas, finally admitted wishes and self-injunctions. And any transcription of her varied orchestration would need to account for screams, cries, and dizzied whoops. Bishop’s inimitable voice depends on the occasional excess that, paradoxically, arrives only in precisely controlled circumstances. Bishop’s excess in eighty-eight exclamation marks reveals her attraction to personae and secondary voices, and her fascination with the expressive potential of animals and children. Ending on her exceptional “Sonnet,” I clarify how that vocal practice changed over her career.