The Story
An exploration of the underlying dialogue with Christianity in the works of a prominent American agnostic poetIn this original study of Elizabeth Bishops lifelong engagement with Christianity, Laurel Snow Corelle illuminates the ways in which Bishops Protestant childhood and reading of Christian literature, coupled with her deep commitment to agnosticism, inform the works of this former poet laureate of the United States. Corelle sees in Bishops writing a sophisticated and sustained interrogation of orthodoxy that exquisitely balances Bishops religious upbringing with her agnostic stance.Corelle immerses the reader in Bishops works and world in order to convey the rigor, subtlety, and complexity of the poets dialogue with Christianity and its literature. Bishop was a selfproclaimed nonbeliever; yet she grew up in two devout Protestant homes and she studied Christian literature throughout her life. As a result some of the perspectives and prejudices voiced in her verse are transparently Protestant. Placing Bishops work in direct relation to some of her favorite Christian texts, Corelle locates her within the intellectual milieu of postWorld War II America in which she wrote.The study, which spans the course of Bishops poetry and draws as well on her letters and prose, illustrates how she incorporated allusions to scripture and Protestant sacraments in a subversive critique of organized Christianity and how her appropriation of three traditional genres common to Christian literatureallegory, pastoral elegy, and spiritual autobiographyadvanced her own poetic purposes.
Description
An exploration of the underlying dialogue with Christianity in the works of a prominent American agnostic poetIn this original study of Elizabeth Bishops lifelong engagement with Christianity, Laurel Snow Corelle illuminates the ways in which Bishops Protestant childhood and reading of Christian literature, coupled with her deep commitment to agnosticism, inform the works of this former poet laureate of the United States. Corelle sees in Bishops writing a sophisticated and sustained interrogation of orthodoxy that exquisitely balances Bishops religious upbringing with her agnostic stance.Corelle immerses the reader in Bishops works and world in order to convey the rigor, subtlety, and complexity of the poets dialogue with Christianity and its literature. Bishop was a selfproclaimed nonbeliever; yet she grew up in two devout Protestant homes and she studied Christian literature throughout her life. As a result some of the perspectives and prejudices voiced in her verse are transparently Protestant. Placing Bishops work in direct relation to some of her favorite Christian texts, Corelle locates her within the intellectual milieu of postWorld War II America in which she wrote.The study, which spans the course of Bishops poetry and draws as well on her letters and prose, illustrates how she incorporated allusions to scripture and Protestant sacraments in a subversive critique of organized Christianity and how her appropriation of three traditional genres common to Christian literatureallegory, pastoral elegy, and spiritual autobiographyadvanced her own poetic purposes.
