17 pages • 34 minutes read
Elizabeth BishopInsomnia
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1951A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context
With any poem, it is important to have a contextual understanding of the poet and the world the poet lived in. This is especially true for Bishop and for this poem.
Bishop’s entire life contained the consistent themes of loss and loneliness. Bishop expresses this in one of her most famous poems, “One Art” (1976), where she says the art of loss is easy to master as she chronicles some of the losses she experienced throughout her life. This goes back to her childhood, as she lost both parents before she was five.
Even in adulthood, while having a good core friend group, Bishop lived a pretty isolated life of travel. And while she experienced love, she also dealt with great tragedy, including the suicide of her lover Lota de Macedo Soares in 1967.
Additionally, Bishop lived in an era where it was almost unthinkable to be an out lesbian, and this certainly caused a great deal of stress. Bishop was always reserved about her sexuality, but it deeply influenced her poetry. “Insomnia” is a good example of a poem with entirely implicit, veiled lesbian themes. This coded expression typifies much of Bishop’s poetry.
Literary Context: Modernism/Confessionalism
Bishop worked through the tail end of Modernism and through the heyday of Confessionalism, two popular poetic movements throughout the 20th century. But while poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound experimented with fragmentation, form, and voice in their Modernist poems, Bishop was more reserved in her experimentation, focusing more on the Imagist belief in exact detail and the strength of imagery to establish mood and theme. While Confessional poets like Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath were writing manifestos of earnest expression, personal confession, and dealing with the taboo, Bishop mostly skirted these things, preferring to use imagery and metaphor instead of airing her soul out in her poetry.
Bishop’s style complicates her position in any movement or poetic school. Instead of falling into a neat classification, Bishop occupies her own unique niche in 20th-century poetry.
Related Titles
By Elizabeth Bishop
