19 pages • 38 minutes read
Elizabeth BishopThe Shampoo
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1955A 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
Literary Context
Bishop published “The Shampoo” in 1955 when Postmodernism was emerging. Postmodern poets tended to emphasize fragmentation and playfulness. Fragmentation appears in the poem through the rocks, lichens, and stars. The speaker breaks up their dear friend’s hair into separate elements. Fragmentation also develops due to the emphasis on the friend’s hair; it’s as if the speaker severs their friend’s hair from the rest of their body. The fragmentation links to playfulness because the speaker plays with the idea that washing a close friend’s hair can be a heavenly activity or natural phenomenon that involves “the rings around the moon” (Line 5) and “shooting stars” (Line 13).
The vivid description of the rocks and lichens in Stanza 1 indicates the influence of Imagism—an early 20th-century literary movement that stressed images. Imagists—Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams, among them—believed a strong poem provided the reader with a precise picture. The “spreading” lichens, with their “gray, concentric shocks” (Line 3), qualify as a meticulous image.
Another literary context is confessional poetry—a personal, intimate type of poetry practiced by one of Bishop’s best friends Robert Lowell. Lowell wrote poems about his life and his struggles with mental health and marriage, and Bishop admired his poetry but not the confessional movement he inspired. In a letter to the poet and critic Randall Jarrell, Bishop calls confessional poetry “the anguish-school” and derides confessional poets “self-pitiers” (Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters, the Library of America, 2008). Yet an open reading of “The Shampoo” puts it in the confessional context. In A Miracle for Breakfast, Megan Marshall explains how Bishop liked to wash the hair of her partner Lota, so it “became a ritual they couldn’t give up.” Marshall adds, “The ritual became a poem.” That poem is “The Shampoo.” When biographical details enter the picture, the poem turns into a personal moment between two women—or, in a word, it becomes confessional.
Historical Context
A close reading of Bishop’s poem doesn’t make the historical context too significant. The speaker and their friend appear to transcend time, as the speaker declares, “Time is / nothing if not amenable” (Line 11-12). Thus, the speaker and their friend take charge of the historical context or better put, can block out any pressures that a specific historical context might bring into their heavenly world.
An open reading of Bishop’s poem demonstrates the importance of historical context. Read as a record of Bishop and Lota’s romantic relationship, the historical context reveals why Bishop might have taken extra care to obscure the identities of the speaker and their “dear friend” (Line 9). In the 1950s, there was little tolerance for LGBTQ+ people. A gay or lesbian person could lose their job, or much more, if their sexual identity came to light. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association published the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which categorized gay and lesbian sexualities as a “sociopathic personality disorder.”
Conversely, perhaps the obscured identities have less to do with 1950s bias and are more about Bishop’s preference to preserve her private life and stay away from labels and categorizations. As Elizabeth wrote to the poet May Swenson, “I like black & white, yellow & red, young & old, rich and poor, and male & female, all mixed up” (quoted in A Miracle for Breakfast).
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