Elizabeth Bishop’s style of poetry writing was one of understatements in my opinion. This is sometimes what one would think of when you think of poetry, most people expect to have to have to really think about a poem in order to understand it, though sometimes we aren’t even meant to understand it at all. The subject and tone of the poem in lying in the words, and left to the reader to find. This is completely different from the ‘confessional’ type of poetry, in which one tells exactly what they are thinking in their poem, and describing their life in detail. Bishop was a fan of figurative expression and you can find many instances in each of her poems. In The Bight, Bishop talks about Pelicans crashing, and chicken wire, and other seemingly unappealing views. These particular figures can be the vehicle in this poem, that speculate a tenor of unhappiness on Bishop’s birthday. The smell of gas, and the oversized war birds, and unanswered letters give an unstated essence of bitterness, and unrest. We know for fact that Bishop had an unhappy childhood filled with tragedy with the death of her father, and the insanity of her mother, so it makes sense that she would inexplicitly have a tone of sadness in her poetry. In another poem One Art, Bishop talks about the ‘art’ of losing. She mentions losing keys, her mother’s watch, and two cities. This ‘art’ is what I take as the vehicle, although the specific objects she lost could be vehicles in their own. The tenor expressed is one of loneliness. Her losing her keys is not essentially important; it’s that she feels that she loses everything important. She feels like she is a ‘master’ of losing things, and this she states four times in her short poem. Keys get you where you need to go; therefore losing them will be a set-back. She didn’t ‘lose’ cities, maybe she had to leave them, and it seems that she loved these cities. She even says ‘losing you, I shan’t have lied’, which implies she lost yet again, another one she loves.
The ‘arms race’ is a good example of consensus at work. American’s consensus belief was that we needed to be racing the Soviets in order to stay ‘on top of the world’. They seemed to have been supremely successful in World War 2, therefore they were the ones we needed to be on the lookout for. After our own government started expanding our armed forces, warfare vehicles and weapons, and even attempting to develop better nuclear weapons, our country began to think this was what we needed. Since this was the consensus belief, the myth developed that if we weren’t ahead of the Soviets in nuclear development, and even in the space race, we weren’t doing our job and we were losing. Our criticizing the government when we thought that the Soviet Union was advancing in technology farther than we had, was just our giving in to the myth. Honestly, most Americans did not know what the real deal was, they were just falling into line with the doxa.
Figurative expression is a way of recounting things that is not explicit, but very vague, and somewhat left up to the imagination of the reader. The poems, or literary works have an undertone to them, but what the author is really thinking is never clearly stated. Take Bishop’s poems as an example, specifically The Bight. Her description of unpleasant things gives a tenor of unhappiness, as do many of her poems. Consensus discourse is more of a general accepted idea that is clear among the people. This is a conventional way of thinking that is widespread and doesn’t leave much room for alteration. Figurative expression is an antidote to the myth because it is the opposite of the common ideas which are clearly stated, it is implicit rather than explicit. Figurative expression could also be an alternative knowledge because it is so different than the conventional discourse. Benefits could be that it can mean different things for different people, but a hazard is that the tenor could be missed completely.
