Bishop’s Stevensian Architecture in Paris and After

Abstract

This essay builds on the scholarship of Barbara Page, Bethany Hicok, Eleanor Cook, Julia E. Daniel, and Jo Gill to further examine Bishop’s use of Stevens’s poetics to recast Parisian architecture. How much of his twenties and thirties styles are found in her work? Bishop’s ever-shifting ambivalences toward French aesthetic traditions characterize her thirties poetry in contrast to the Floridian poetry; both styles are published in North & South published in 1946. Does the new bright realism found in Florida mean the end of Bishop’s French aesthetics, or do the Parisian styles endure?