The Shampoo

Elizabeth Bishop is the author of the lyric poem “The Shampoo.” Bishop published the poem in 1955 as a part of her second collection of poems, A Cold Spring. “The Shampoo” qualifies as a lyric poem since it’s short and expresses personal moments and feelings. The poem sends the message that common activities—like washing someone’s hair—can possess extraordinary powers. The poem aptly reflects Bishop’s work because most of her poems involve closely looking at the things that make up the everyday world and describing their fantastic, captivating quality. For example, in her famous poem “The Fish” (1946), Bishop illustrates the intensity of catching a fish, and in “The Man-Moth” (1946), another well-known work, Bishop turns a typo that she observed in a New York Times article into an enigmatic creature. With “The Shampoo,” Bishop makes shampooing a close friend’s hair seem like a spiritual and natural phenomenon. Although her poems can come across as distant and dispassionate, many of them—“The Shampoo” included—are the result of private emotions. Bishop took her time with her poems, only publishing around 100 poems in her career. Her painstaking efforts paid off when she won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.