The Mountain

Bishop began writing early in life and maintained several well-documented friendships with other writers of her time, including Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Lowell became famous as the father of the Confessional movement in poetry—writing about personal matters that had hitherto been considered taboo. Writers in this movement include Sylvia Plath, Maxine Kumin, and Anne Sexton. Their work explored themes of sexuality, drug use, alcoholism, abuse, and dissatisfaction with traditional social roles.

Though Bishop encouraged Lowell in his writing, she did not belong to his school of confessional poets. While poets like Lowell and Plath wrote openly about their lives, Bishop distinguished herself by remaining more aloof socially and stylistically. Unlike her contemporaries, Bishop wrote more about the objective world and how it influences one’s mental and emotional state in the moment. Her poems tend to eschew the pronoun “I,” or references to her personal history. Many of her pieces are written from an outside persona. Poems such as “The Mountain” explore feelings around aging, isolation, and the mystery of nature through the voice of an inanimate object.

Bishop’s persona poems allowed her to explore personal feelings in a less-personalized way, some arguing that this is what makes her poetry compelling and universal.