Twentieth Century Literature: Natural history and epiphany: Elizabeth Bishop's Darwin Letter

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Natural history and epiphany: Elizabeth Bishop's Darwin Letter

Zachariah Pickard

Writing in his Autobiography about the joys of beetle collecting and, particularly, the pleasure of discovering a new species, Charles Darwin makes an interesting comparison:

     No poet ever felt more delighted at seeing his first poem published
     than I did at seeing, in Stephens' Illustrations of British
     Insects, the magic words, "captured by C. Darwin, Esq." (21)

Here Darwin compares the simplest of his accomplishments--the capture of a new beetle--to the publication of a poem. Taking my cue from this remark, I would like to compare the pattern underpinning Darwin's work to Elizabeth Bishop's characteristic process of epiphany. The idea is originally Bishop's and was first put forward as part of a correspondence between Bishop and Anne Stevenson that took place in the 1960s, while Stevenson was working on what was to be the first full-length study of Bishop's poetry. In a letter of 28 October 1963, Stevenson sent Bishop a working outline of the book, the second chapter of which was to deal with the relationship between Bishop and "the surrealists and the symbolists too," particularly "Klee and Ernst." Stevenson perceived in all three an interest in "hallucinatory and dream material" and a shared belief that "there is no split personality, but rather a sensitivity that extends equally into the subconscious and the conscious world." In her reply Bishop agrees about the lack of a "split" between the conscious and the unconscious but is less enthusiastic about surrealism. Instead, she changes the topic to Darwin:

     Yes, I agree with you. I think that's what I was trying to say in
     the speech above. There is no "split." Dreams, works of art (some),
     glimpses of the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life,
     unexpected moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision
     of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems
     enormously important. I can't believe we are wholly irrational-and
     I do admire Darwin! But reading Darwin, one admires the beautiful
     and solid case being built up out of his endless heroic
     observations, almost unconscious or automatic--and then comes a
     sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the
     strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes
     fixed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off
     into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing
     it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-
     forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. (Letter 8-20 Jan. 1964;
     hereafter Jan. letter)

There is much to be said about this passage, but what I am interested in here is the somewhat surprising shift from surrealism to Darwin. Though Bishop flirted with surrealism in her youth, she later took pains to distance herself from it: "I [...] am not a surrealist" she wrote to her publisher with uncharacteristic firmness in 1946, worried about what might appear on the back of her first collection of poetry (One Art 135). And yet, confronted with Stevenson's attempt to link her to Ernst, whom she calls "a dreadful painter" (Jan. letter), Bishop, ever polite, does not correct Stevenson so much as simply change the subject. When Stevenson raises the question of surrealism and the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, Bishop agrees, and then talks about Darwin.

The link here is Ernst's Histoire naturelle, a book that Bishop owned as a young woman, and which she mentions to Stevenson as one of the few of Ernst's works that she "liked" (Jan. letter). In a letter to Hallie Tompkins, written when she first got the book, she describes it as an attempt to "mak[e] fun of Darwin" (qtd. in Millier 89). But though the train of thought that leads Bishop from surrealism to Ernst's Histoire naturelle to Darwin is clear, the use to which she then puts Darwin is considerably more complicated. She makes of him an aesthetic role model, painting his "perfectly useless concentration" as what "one seems to want in art, in experiencing it" and also the "thing that is necessary for its creation." Implicitly, Bishop redirects Stevenson from one model of mind to another, suggesting that it is Darwin who shares her ideas about the lack of a "split" between the conscious and the unconscious mind, not the surrealists. (1)

In order to make sense of this strange maneuver, Bishop's comments need to be examined in two related contexts: first the general appeal to science and the figure of the scientist in high-modernist statements of poetics, and second the methods and intellectual models of Victorian natural history that Darwin actually practiced. In what follows, then, I will explore the ways in which poets of the era just before Bishop's use the scientist as a figure for the poet, in order to show how differently Bishop uses Darwin. Darwin, I will argue, is not the sort of scientist that Eliot or Pound has in mind nor the sort of scientist that we know today. By recovering the intellectual methods underlying Darwin's work, I hope to provide a model for reading a number of Bishop's poems, but I will focus on "In the Waiting Room," a poem that not only embodies Bishop's Darwinian approach but actually rewrites large portions of her letter to Stevenson in poetic form.

A disclaimer is needed, though: throughout this article I will be speaking about both modern science and Victorian natural history in a way that a student of science might find somewhat naive. I will assume, for instance, that modern experimentalist science is essentially objective, though the extent to which this is really the case is obviously questionable. Similarly, I will make arguments about the role of random collection in Victorian natural history that will ignore the question of whether a project so closely associated with colonialism can really be considered random. For a philosopher of science these are serious problems, but my subject is poetry, and my scientists are not real, but rather the imaginary figures that poets think of when they think of science. My experimentalists, therefore, will be perfectly impersonal, and my natural historians will remain free from the taint of colonialism, and my reader should remember that I am speaking more about ideas of science and natural history than I am about science and natural history themselves.

I began by suggesting that Bishop employs Darwin as a sort of substitute for the surrealists, gently redirecting Stevenson's attention away from Ernst and toward someone with whom she felt more in tune. But there is more to the Darwin letter than a rejection of surrealism. Thomas Travisano has suggested that Bishop is, in certain ways, a "postsurrealist" (45), but by using a figure from the previous century as her aesthetic champion, Bishop seems intent on making herself a sort of presurrealist. There is a tone of dismay, of repulsion from modernity in the Darwin letter: she complains of the "ghastly taste," "ugliness," and "bad manners" of other writers and claims that, of her own poems, most of the ones she "can still abide were written before [she] met Robert Lowell" in 1947. There is something elegiac about this attitude, a nostalgia for a more genteel age, as if the surrealists were merely part of a larger problem with modern letters and modern times. Her Darwin is, in this sense, opposed not only to surrealism but to modernity more generally and, as I will argue, to certain aspects of high modernism and its heirs. Her choice of Darwin instead of a more contemporary scientific figure is revealing in that it allows her to sidestep a number of conventional twentieth-century ideas about science.

In her next letter to Stevenson, Bishop writes of finding a reference to Darwin in William Carlos Williams's "Asphodel, that greeny flower," a reference that is "not in [her] sense, at all" (Letter 23 Mar. 1964), and it is crucial to distinguish Bishop's Darwin from Williams's. For Williams, as for many, Darwin "opened our eyes" (323) by destroying ancient dogmata, and it is the clarity of his thought that is so attractive. In this sense, Williams uses Darwin in a familiar, modernist manner, as a model of clear sight and logical thought. But Williams's approach is not Bishop's. Bishop was enthusiastic about Darwin in a very personal way, calling him both "one of the people I like best in the world" (One Art 543) and "my favorite hero, almost" (544). These comments suggest a connection to Darwin the man as much as to Darwin the symbol of science. And so where certain of her modernist predecessors sought to include scientific images in their statements of poetics in order to absorb some of the aura of objectivity and precision that the scientist brought, Bishop's use of Darwin is quite different, both more specific and more human.

Insofar as modernism sought an aesthetics of clarity and precision, of stripped-down objectivity, the scientist made an attractive emblem. The "poet and the scientist," Marianne Moore suggests, "work analogously":

     Both are willing to waste effort. To be hard on himself is one of
     the main strengths of each. Each is attentive to clues, each must
     narrow the choice, must strive for precision. (30)

The characterization of "the poet" as one who is objective ("hard on himself"), eliminates clutter ("narrow[s] the choice"), and "strive[s] for precision" reveals a number of modernist preoccupations. Ezra Pound similarly recommends "the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap" (Literary 6) and labels his ideogrammatic method "THE METHOD OF SCIENCE" (ABC 26). Most famously, perhaps, T.S. Eliot unites tenor and vehicle when, in order to show that only through "depersonalization" can art "be said to approach to the condition of science," he likens the mind of the poet to "a bit of finely filiated platinum" (40). Eliot's rhetoric here takes it as given that art should approach the condition of science, and his argument about the relationship between tradition and the individual talent is implicitly based on familiar ideas about how scientific work is done. In Pound's words,

     there are simple procedures, and there are known discoveries,
     clearly marked [... and] in each age one or two men of genius find
     something and express it. (Literary 19)

One builds, that is, on the work of one's predecessors, thus contributing to a larger project. According to Pound, the individual talent can contribute by "find[ing]" something; for Eliot it does so by introducing "the new (the really new) work of art" into the field (38). Behind much of the high-modernist rhetoric about the project of poetry lies a set of ideas and notions about the experimentalist sciences.

But as Charles Altieri points out, the modernists are not entirely comfortable with some of the implications of the scientific metaphor:

     However liberating science's version of impersonal dehumanization
     might prove, [modernist] artists almost always had to restore some
     aspects of the romantic values they were ostensively denying, as in
     Eliot's claim that only those who knew what it meant to suffer from
     personality would appreciate the impersonality he was calling for.
     (77)

Hence too Pound's recursion to "men of genius." This reluctance to commit fully to impersonality is not an obstacle for everyone, though. Across the channel, Andre Breton, the founder of surrealism, picks up some of Eliot's terms in his own argument about the extinction of personality, telling his reader that one might as well speak "du talent de ce metre en platine" (39) ("of this platinum ruler's talent") as of the artist's talent. Whether or not Breton is consciously invoking Eliot as an authority, the two of them fit into a useful narrative of literary depersonalization: modernism publicly endorses a scientific, depersonalized notion of poetry as a project while secretly harboring certain misgivings; feeling none of modernism's doubt, surrealism picks up on the scientific language and declares that its recherches will eliminate personality in favor of the unconscious; and, more recently, some postmodern poets have celebrated the eradication of personality for its own sake. Christian Bok, for instance, Canada's postmodern enfant terrible, writes enthusiastically that The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed, a book made up of random phrases generated by a computer program, is "not so much a book of surreal poems as it is an obit for classic poets" that "confounds the very idea of authorship, refuting the privileged uniqueness of poetic genius" by proving that "the involvement of an author in the production of literature has henceforth become discretionary." Where the surrealists and modernists believe in setting the self aside in favor of something greater (the unconscious, precision, tradition), it is the setting aside itself that so pleases Bok.

Bishop is closer to the modernists on this front and closer, particularly, to what Altieri calls "the romantic values they were ostensively denying" (77). She departs from the narrative of impersonality, as her choice of scientist hero makes clear. If the ideas about science that the modernists invoke in their discussion of poetry and art reflect modern, experimentalist scientific practices, Bishop, by choosing a scientist from another era, one who practiced a form of science that had largely ceased to exist, steps away from the dominant discourse of poetry as science and instead invokes Victorian natural history as her model.

Darwin and his colleagues have little in common with the lab-coated figures that Eliot's imagery summons up, and one must leave behind certain ideas about the disinterestedness and impersonality of science and its emphasis on precision and specialization in order to understand what exactly Bishop is invoking when she chooses Darwin as her artistic model. Victorian natural history does not agree well with more contemporary ideas about science on any number of levels: it prefers observation in the field to experimentation in the laboratory; it does "not require any great accuracy in [...] measurements" (Darwin, Autobiography 100); and it is practiced largely by untrained or half-trained enthusiasts like Darwin himself. Most importantly, though, natural history differs from a more modern notion of science in that it is organized around accumulation rather than reduction. This emphasis on accumulation exists on a number of levels, from the physical work of collecting specimens to the all-encompassing scope of natural history's inquiry.

Even in his own time, Darwin's type of science was falling out of fashion. In the "most thoroughly marked and underlined page" in Bishop's copy of the Autobiography (Rognoni 246), Darwin's son Francis points out that his father wrote and worked in a "non-modern spirit and manner" and that he was "a Naturalist in the old sense of the word, that is, a man who works at many branches of science, not merely a specialist in one" (Autobiography 106). This model of science was rapidly losing ground, and by the middle of the nineteenth century "natural history had fragmented into separate scientific disciplines and broken into subdisciplines" (Farber 33). Darwin, rather than specializing, published on a wide array of subjects, including among other things coral reefs, mould, barnacles, worms, orchids, insectivorous plants, the expression of emotion, and, of course, species. As a natural historian, Darwin follows Buffon, whose 36-volume Histoire naturelle, generale et particuliere (1749-1804) became "the encyclopedia of the natural world" (Farber 20) by providing a "complete natural history of all living beings and minerals" (14). For Buffon and for Darwin, natural history is, quite literally, the history of nature, the study of all physical things over all of time. This model of science is obviously very different from the more specialized one invoked by the modernists and their heirs, and it implies a very different set of values and work habits.

The precision now associated with science is based on ideas of specialization and reduction, and when the modernists use science as a model for poetry, they tend to invoke such ideas. For Moore, the scientist and poet "must narrow the choice," and it is the impulse toward the sleek that drives Pound to prefer "the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap." Moore and Pound are speaking here of different parts of the creative process, but the impulse is similar. Moore focuses on perception, on the work to be done before composition, and compares it to the work of the scientist eliminating possible hypotheses, narrowing the choices in order to find the correct one; Pound is focused on the act of writing itself, the building up of words on the page, and endorses the concision of scientific prose. Moore, in other words, is trimming ideas before sitting down to write; Pound is holding back words that are desperate to fill his page. For both, science is precise in that it reduces; less is more.

Darwin works in the opposite direction, by accretion, as is perhaps inevitable when one's topic is all of the natural world. As James Paradis argues, the phenomena that natural history seeks to explain are "hidden from the senses" because they take place over "magnitudes of space and time that human physiology [is] not equipped to apprehend" (93). As a result, it is only through the slow accumulation of individual "moments of perception" that the natural historian can gain access to the history of nature (94). No single reported fact is of use, but through what Bishop calls the "almost unconscious or automatic" process of observation, a substantial enough body of material develops, and the natural historian can synthesize and extrapolate. In this sense, natural history is a science not only of physical collection--the natural history museum of today has its origin in the curiosity cabinet of the sixteenth century--but of intellectual collection. And these two notions of collection are intricately linked in Darwin, as his Autobiography suggests:

     By the time I went to day-school my taste for natural history, and
     more especially for collecting, was well developed. [...] The
     passion for collecting which leads a man to be a systematic
     naturalist, a virtuoso, or a miser, was very strong in me. (6)

Collection here is both a more specialized subset of natural history and the underlying habit of mind that "leads a man to be a systematic naturalist." The principle of collection, that is, structures both the work one does and the way one thinks.

The basic intellectual process of natural history moves from collection to synthesis, as the very first page of On the Origin of Species suggests:

     it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made
     out on this question [of species] by patiently accumulating and
     reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any
     bearing on it. (95)

Where the concrete work of natural history is a process of what Bishop calls "heroic observations," the eventual intellectual work is a process of immense synthesis. Darwin characterized his own mind as "a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts" (Autobiography 54), and it is crucial to his method that all of the facts--"all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing"--be incorporated. This basic method of accumulation and synthesis preserves a certain mystery that more modern notions of science can lack. Moore's gradual elimination of hypotheses is a sure and steady process, which has no moment of--for lack of a better word--inspiration. Eliot, by likening the creative process to a chemical reaction, implies that the creation of art is methodical, even inevitable, so long as one has the appropriate materials. But in Darwin's method there is an unexpected moment given to the scientist, a sudden shift, what Bishop calls a "sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown." As plodding as the process of collection may seem, it builds toward a moment of vision at which an internal, abstract world emerges.

As James Paradis argues, there is something counterintuitively romantic about this process. Though natural history does not privilege the individual moment of perception in quite the way that romanticism does, it does rely on a process of imaginative synthesis. Darwin's vision is not "the result of an immediate act of perception in physical nature"--not, that is, an imaginative reaction to the visual presence of the real world--but rather an "aesthetic response to a mental landscape founded upon generalization" (Paradis 87). The slow accumulation of observations functions like the piecing together of a mental jigsaw puzzle. In an analogy that calls to mind a preoccupation of Bishop's, Paradis likens the process to cartography, which also translates individual moments of perception into an abstract picture of reality. Beginning with individual observations, with measurements taken, cartography moves outward to position "natural entities in relation to one another and not in relation to the observer" (101). Similarly, natural history depends on the leap from the concrete seen to the abstract imagined, and is "no less the product of the imagination" than the work of the romantic poet (94). The goal of natural history is to move "beyond moments of perception to the continental scope of land formations and species distribution, to the temporal dimension of the prehistoric past." The natural historian needs to move between "a concrete landscape, full of distinct, palpable organic forms, and an abstract physical scheme," to be "alternately at the center of the whole and at its distant periphery" (101).

Paradis's account of the intersection of "the aesthetic idealism of Romantic art" and the "traditions of the geological and natural sciences" (85) helps to explain the attraction Bishop felt for Darwin. The jump from a patient accumulation of detail to an imaginative realization of something larger and more abstract is not only what she describes in her letter to Stevenson but also the pattern that underlies a number of her poems. "The Fish" is the clearest example of this pattern, moving as it does from careful and patient description to epiphany without ever quite making explicit what exactly tips the balance. But other poems--"Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," "At the Fishhouses," "Questions of Travel," "The Armadillo"--evince the same internal structure.

All of these poems, though, were written before the Darwin letter, and while they share the structure that the letter describes, they do not really come out of it. "In the Waiting Room" (Poems 159-61), however, was finished no later than August 1967, when Bishop sent a draft to Robert Lowell (Millier 444), which puts its date of composition around or slightly after her letter to Stevenson. The poem takes up an episode that Bishop had already treated in prose, in "The Country Mouse," a work written in 1961 but published only posthumously. It is impossible to know if Bishop made a conscious decision not to publish the prose version of the episode, but read together with the Darwin letter, the poem seems to supersede and prose piece in such a way as to render it superfluous. Perhaps, having either temporarily or permanently set aside "The Country Mouse," Bishop found herself articulating to Stevenson a set of ideas about poetry and the conscious and unconscious mind and relating them all to Darwin and the methods of natural history. Having thus clarified the issues in her own mind, she was moved to rewrite the waiting-room episode as "In the Waiting Room." This narrative is, of course, conjecture, but it helps to frame a number of crucial differences between the two versions of the episode and a number of similarities between the Darwin letter and the poem.

In "The Country Mouse," the waiting-room episode comes at the very end of a long series of memories, all centered around the experience of being taken at the age of six from rural Nova Scotia to Worcester, Massachusetts. The details of the episode are mostly the same as they are in the poem, but with a few key differences: the National Geographic plays a much smaller role--she only looks at the cover--and there is no "oh! of pain" to trigger her epiphany (Poems 160). Instead, the feeling comes of itself, quite suddenly:

     I looked at the magazine cover--I could read most of the words--
     shiny, glazed, yellow and white. The black letters said:
     FEBRUARY 1918. A feeling of absolute and utter desolation came
     over me. (Prose 32-33)

This "awful sensation" is "like coasting downhill [...] only much worse, and it quickly smashed into a tree" (33). The unpleasantness of this sensation is a significant difference between the story and the poem. "The Country Mouse" is a long story about a child's unhappiness, and in that context this particular episode functions as a sort of summation of all the many unpleasant and unsettling things that take place over the course of the story; the episode consists essentially of the grim realization that "you are going to be you forever." "In the Waiting Room," on the other hand, comprises a discrete experience and functions as an ontological epiphany rather than an existential crisis, a visionary shift based on the one she ascribes to Darwin.

The speaker of the poem "carefully/studie[s]" the contents of the National Geographic (159), and the things she sees in it--volcanoes, cannibals, "Babies with pointed heads"--take the place of the accumulated events of "The Country Mouse." By replacing the many miseries of an individual with the collected observations of natural history (of which National Geographic is devoted to a popularized form) Bishop lays a foundation for a larger leap. The stakes are raised; the poem is not autobiography but epiphany, and her hero is no longer a mouse but a figure based on Darwin. Like "the lonely young" Darwin making "observations," the solitary six-year-old begins by observing "arctics and overcoats,/lamps and magazines" (Poems 159). Just as a "forgetful phrase" sends Darwin "sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown," an "oh! of pain" sends her "falling off/the round, turning world," with the waiting room "sliding/beneath a big black wave" (161). As Darwin slides with "his eyes fixed on facts and minute details," she falls with her "eyes glued to the cover/of the National Geographic" (160). And just as Darwin's slip reveals "the strangeness of his undertaking," the speaker knows "that nothing stranger" than this epiphany "had ever happened" or "could ever happen."

Beyond these resemblances, there are also similarities in intellectual structure between the poem and Bishop's understanding of Darwin. The poem dramatizes an abrupt recognition of what one is to oneself--"you are an I"--and an equally abrupt understanding of how one is thought of by others--"you are an Elizabeth"--and in doing so it conflates the first, second, and third person. But it moves even further, into the third-person plural, declaring that "you are one of them," and it is here that the abstraction of the natural historian truly begins. The speaker glides from her own point of view to the view of those who know her name and on to a fully abstracted, classified view of herself as simply one of "them." The effect is of a movie camera pulling back from a closeup to a long shot and on to a view of all humanity--she has fallen off the world and can see it whole. In a very few moments, the speaker recognizes herself both subjectively and objectively; she is, in Paradis's terms, both "at the center of the whole and at its distant periphery." And like Darwin, from that distance what interests her is the question of species, the "similarities" that "held us all together/or made us all just one?" (161). She makes a few half-hearted suggestions--"boots, hands, the family voice"--but leaves the question essentially open. It is, after all, the "unknown" into which she is sliding; Bishop's interest is not in the Darwin who sclves the question of species but in the Darwin who first imagines it, who catches "a peripheral vision of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but that seems enormously important."

The poem is both more condensed and more expansive than the prose piece, taking only a single episode, but making of it an epiphany of a much larger sort. Where "The Country Mouse" describes the feeling as "coasting downhill," the poem works on a larger scale, turning the hill into the entire world. Like a natural historian, the speaker builds toward a theory of everything from a set of minute observations, depicting the visionary moment that comes from a "a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration" on the things of the world. And this is, in the end, what the Darwin letter is about: the relationship between the process of empirical observation and the gift of vision or epiphany. Crucial to Bishop's aesthetic is a unique combination of perseverance and mystery: perseverance of observation that leads mysteriously to epiphany.

This aesthetic is modeled after the natural historian and, by an odd twist, after nature itself as it is presented in Darwin's writings. The process of natural history is based on a notion of almost blind accumulation, and part of what makes Darwin as significant as he is is the way he extends this aspect of his method into his theory, "successfully eliminat[ing] teleology from the pool of common metaphysical ideas" (Carroll 30). He does so by using the nonteleological methodology of natural history as a blueprint for his theory of natural selection. Overtly, Darwin derives his theory from the example of animal husbandry: as the farmer selects breeding stock, nature selects successful variants. But this analogy implies purpose in nature as in a farmer. The real analogy behind natural selection is the work of the natural historian.

Darwin's topic--the origin of species--is that moment when, as a product of countless random variations over countless generations, a new species can be said to come into being. A great deal of what Darwin is arguing against is the position of natural theology--that all species were created at one time and that species is a fact, not an idea. In this sense his work is about the origin of species in the abstract singular as well as the origin of species in the concrete plural, and his work shows that the idea of species is essentially an enabling fiction: "No one definition [of species] has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species" (Origin 122). Species is merely the point at which enough random empirical fact (variation) has accumulated to give birth to a new abstraction (species). Random variation is as "perfectly useless" as the concentration of the natural historian, and yet it still leads to the abstraction of species, just as what Paradis calls the natural historian's "moments of perception" (94) lead to "an abstract physical scheme" (101).

And this process continues up the chain of taxonomical being:

     Thus the small differences distinguishing varieties of the same
     species, steadily tend to increase till they come to equal the
     greater differences between species of the same genus, or even of
     distinct genera. (Darwin, Origin 175)

At the end of his chapter on natural selection, Darwin likens the natural world to a tree, the individual twigs of which represent variations, the larger twigs species, the branches genera, and so on. The "great branches" that stand for the classes and orders of the natural world "were themselves, once, when the tree was small, budding twigs" (176). In drawing this analogy Darwin goes beyond denying the simultaneous creation of all species and calls into question the idea of classification as a whole. Species, genus, family, order--all become little more than arbitrary stops on a continuum that begins with random variation of the smallest kind. In this way the origin of species (or genus or family or order) is an oddly satisfying metaphor for what Bishop is trying to say about the conscious and the unconscious. Variation is to species as observation is to abstraction as conscious is to unconscious. There is no split. Rather, there is a continuous spectrum, and there is the moment when a buildup at one end of the spectrum brings about a click at the other end, when accumulated observations trigger, in some mysterious way, a giddy epiphany. To read the world through Bishop's letter, the origin of species is in that moment when nature, her eyes fixed on minute details, sinks or slides "giddily off into the unknown."

Like Darwin, Bishop treasures a working interrelation of the conscious and the unconscious mind, a division of intellectual labor. Their work is done, according to Bishop, in sequence: the conscious mind begins with a "perfectly useless concentration" on "facts and minute details," and the unconscious mind follows behind with that "sudden relaxation," the feeling of "sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown." Crucially, Bishop seeks to replicate this process in her reader, insisting that "What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same things that is necessary for its creation." Implicit in the Darwin letter, then, is both a statement of what she seeks in her own poetry and a guide for her reader. Her goal is to craft a set of particulars engrossing enough to draw the reader further and further into the poem so that, once entranced, the reader can be pushed out, half-conscious, into the unknown. She asks the reader simply to read with Darwin's rapt attention, to achieve a "self-forgetful [...] concentration." Ideally, by the poem's end, such careful scrutiny will have transcended itself, and like the speaker of "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," we will have "looked and looked our infant sight away" (Poems 59).

I thank Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the following permissions:

Letters written by Elizabeth Bishop to Anne Stevenson. Copyright [c] 2004 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate.

Excerpts from The Collected Prose by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright [c] 1984 by Alice Helen Methfessel. The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. One Art: Letters by Elizabeth Bishop, selected and edited by Robert Giroux. Copyright [c] 1994 by Alice Methfessel. Introduction and compilation copyright [c] 1994 by Robert Giroux. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Notes

1. For a full discussion of Bishop's rejection of surrealism, see my article "The Attack on Surrealism."

Works cited

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Bishop, Elizabeth. Collected Prose. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, 1984.

______. Complete Poems: 1927-1979. New York: Noonday, 1983.

______. Letter to Anne Stevenson. 8-20 Jan. 1964. Elizabeth Bishop Papers. Washington University, St. Louis.

______. Letter to Anne Stevenson. 23 Mar. 1964. Elizabeth Bishop Papers. Washington University, St. Louis.

______. One Art: Letters. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Noonday, 1994.

Bok, Christian. "How Poems Work." Globe and Mail [Toronto] 27 Apr. 2002: D20.

Breton, Andre. Manifestes du surrealisme. Paris: Gallimard, 1985.

Carroll, Joseph. Introduction. Darwin, Origin 9-72.

Darwin, Charles. Autobiography and Selected Letters. Ed. Francis Darwin. New York: Dover, 1958.

______. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Ed. Joseph Carroll. Peterborough: Broadview, 2003.

Eliot, T.S. Selected Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode. London: Faber, 1975.

Farber, Paul Lawrence. Finding Order in Nature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000.

Millier, Brett Candlish. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Moore, Marianne. Interview with Donald Hall. Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Ed. George Plimpton. New York: Modern Library, 1998. 3-31.

Paradis, James. "Darwin and Landscape." Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives. Ed. James Paradis and Thomas Postlewait. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1981. 85-110.

Pickard, Zachariah. "The Attack on Surrealism in Elizabeth Bishop's Darwin Letter." Studies in the Humanities 3.2 (2004) forthcoming.

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