Sestina

It is difficult to underestimate the cultural impact in the 1920s of the publication of the until-then largely unknown poetry of Emily Dickinson. For the emerging generation of young poets, among them Elizabeth Bishop, who would hone their craft in the 1930s and 1940s, Dickinson’s quietly subversive poetry was both a revelation and a revolution.

In Dickinson’s poetry, Bishop’s generation found license to introduce into poetry the traumas and emotional turmoil of their private lives.

Dickinson’s poetry was like paging through her diary. She introduced the radical concept of the poet, unrefined and blemished, as a persona fit for expression in verse. The self-described Confessional poets of the 1930s and 1940s used the vehicle of poetry to explore private conflicts once deemed unfit or too unseemly for the public forum of poetry. These poets examined mental illness, suicide ideation, dysfunctional relationships, and sexual orientation. These poets, most notably Robert Lowell (a friend of Bishop’s), Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman, shaded their generation’s signature verse in dark and forbidding tones.

Bishop could easily have fit in with the Confessional poets given her significant life traumas: the sudden death of her father, the institutionalization of her mother, her painful childhood search for a home, and her later explorations of her sexuality.