Post-modernity In Elizabeth Bishop's Poetry

Elizabeth Bishop was one of the most profound figures in the 20th century American poetry. She won American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, National Book Award, and Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Also she was the Poet Laureate of the United States, and a Pulitzer Prize winner. Her poems won the favor of the critics with both refreshment and smoothness of the expression, and mystery and insight in meaning. It is accepted by the critics that her poems have avoided the shallow sentiments and self-indulgence. On the contrary, she strives to explore the objective truth with a subtle and accurate language, while at the same time the plain pictures portrayed through her lines sharply disclose the profundity of human existence and life.Due to the historical overlapping of Bishop's literary career and the emergence of postmodernism in America, it is quite necessary to analyze her poems from the perspectives of post-modernity so that we can discover whether her works are integrated with the features of postmodernism. This dissertation, with the purpose of studying the two distinct postmodern features, namely, indeterminacy and immanence, in Bishop's poems, analyzes the themes, language, and writing techniques of Bishop's poems, based on Ihab Hassan's theories on the features of postmodern literature. Thereby, her postmodern awareness can be uncovered.After a brief introduction to Bishop and her accomplishment, and a literature review on the researches on her poetry, the dissertation, on the basis of Ihab Hassan's theories of postmodernism, explores the postmodern features in Bishop's poems, especially indeterminacy and immanence. The indeterminacy is illustrated in decentralization, fragmentation, and openness; the immanence mainly is embodied in the disassembly and reassembly of lines, the conversational style, and the sense of irony. This study of the post-modernity in Bishop's poems enables us to get a deeper understanding of postmodernism, to appreciate better Bishop's poems, and offers more proper perspective to approach her texts.