Natural history and epiphany: Elizabeth Bishop's Darwin Letter

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004 by Zachariah Pickard

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.