Bonnie Costello

In this finely written companion to Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, Bonnie Costello gives a compelling use of Bishop and her ways of seeing and writing.

Questions of Mastery

Elizabeth Bishop

The Plural of Us is the first book to focus on the poet’s use of the first-person plural voice—poetry’s “we.” Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden, Bonnie Costello uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried in this small word. While lyric has long been associated with inwardness and a voice saying “I,” “we” has hardly been noticed, even though it has appeared throughout the history of poetry. Reading for this pronoun in its variety and ambiguity, Costello explores the communal function of poetry—the reasons, risks, and rewards of the first-person plural. Costello adopts a taxonomic approach to her subject, considering “we” from its most constricted to its fully unbounded forms. She also takes a historical perspective, following Auden’s interest in the full range of “the human pluralities” in a time of particular pressure for and against the collective. Costello offers new readings as she tracks his changing approach to voice in democracy. Examples from many other poets—including Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens—arise throughout the book, and the final chapter offers a consideration of how contemporary writers find form for what George Oppen called “the meaning of being numerous.” Connecting insights to philosophy of language and to recent work in concepts of community, The Plural of Us shows how poetry raises vital questions—literary and social—about how we speak of our togetherness.

Poetry and Community in Auden and Others

The Plural of Us

Rachel Galvin

This collection of essays from a distinguished, international group of scholars offers a portrait of W. H. Auden's creativity. The essayists look in fresh ways at Auden's composition process and artistic virtuosity, and at the astonishing breadth of his interests and activities. Critics have long acknowledged Auden's 'second thoughts' with regard to religion and politics, yet few have considered how essential rethinking and revision were to his writing process. His notebooks and drafts served as a fascinating, multifaceted laboratory for his literary experiments; and even after his writing was published, Auden never stopped revising it. The essays collected here explore cross-pollination in the genesis of his works: how theater collaboration, film work, traveling, teaching, reviewing, and wartime activities shaped his literary oeuvre. They uncover neglected episodes that affected his artistic choices, and overlooked archives full of surprising revelations about his writing practice. The essays also explore manuscript evidence that shows the formal experimentation of one of the great versifiers of modern poetry.

Auden at Work

"By exploring literary works of still life by Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and Richard Wilbur - as well as the art of Joseph Cornell - the eminent critic Bonnie Costello considers how exchanges between the arts help to establish vital thresholds between the personal and public realms. In her view, Stevens and Williams bring the turmoil of history into their struggle for local aesthetic order; Bishop "studies history" in the intimate objects and arrangements she finds in her travels; Cornell, an artist inspired by poetry and loved by poets, links his dream boxes to contemporary events; and Richard Wilbur seeks to mend a broken postwar world within the hospitable spheres of art and home.

Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World

Planets on Tables

Just as the look of the American landscape has changed since the nineteenth century, so has our idea of landscape, with a contemplation of wild nature giving way to an understanding of 'Nature' as a human construction. Here Bonnie Costello reads six twentieth-century American poets who have reflected and shaped this transformation and in the process renovated landscape by drawing new images from the natural world and creating new forms for imagining the earth and our relation to it. Showing how these poets' landscapes respond to the sense of constant change, and to the disruption and acceleration of life characteristic of modern experience, Costello's work reveals the special role of poetry in teaching us to dwell on 'shifting ground.' A comprehensive exploration of a powerful dynamic in American poetry, Shifting Ground ranges from the sly subversions of Robert Frost's 'Directive' to the vertiginous 'temporal space' of John Ashbery's 'Haunted Landscape.' Sustained readings of dozens of major poems by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore open new perspectives on landscape as metaphor in these canonical moderns, while illuminating chapters on Amy Clampitt, A. R. Ammons, and John Ashbery map the fluctuating terrain of postmodern poetry with compelling clarity.

Bonnie Costello

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