Poetry's Object Relations: Alone with Elizabeth Bishop

Abstract:Loneliness can wear many affective guises from withdrawal to creativity. This essay reads Elizabeth Bishop's negotiation of the intimate relationship between poetry and loneliness through the lens of British object relations psychoanalysis. Reading Bishop alongside the British school of psychoanalysis firstly illuminates the relationship between poetry and states of solitude; and helps to uncover the ways in which loneliness is recovered in the postwar period from its more dangerous state: isolation. This essay proposes a theory of reading poetry where the refusal of the solipsistic lyric transforms isolated subjects into communities of the lonely.