Poetry for Students, Volume 31

The Fish ‘‘The Fish’’ is considered one of Elizabeth Bish- op’s best and most popular poems, and it is her most frequently antho ...

Author Biography Elizabeth Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts, the only child of Wil- liam Thomas ...

During this period, she worked on the poems that appear in her acclaimed collectionGeography III (1976). The collection won the ...

Lines 11–20 The fish’s flaking skin looks old, like wall hangings falling from a wall. Its mottled brown appearance is like old ...

adequately define that which appears before her. That the speaker must struggle through the major- ity of the poem to do so only ...

The speaker even finds beauty in the hooks protruding from the fish’s lower lip. Although that beauty is not as explicit as the ...

Descriptive language also permeates the speaker’s epiphany at the end of the poem, encom- passing the boat on which she fishes. ...

works of psychology by such leading figures as Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. Existential phi- losophy further brought the idea of ...

the poetic ‘‘I.’’ Notably, while modernism began as a European movement that gained ground in the United States, confessional po ...

The first line in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘‘The Fish’’ begins as a standard fisherman’s tale, as in, ‘‘I hooked a fish and it was thi ...

theanimal...isanecessary step in the process of looking closely, of admitting the ‘reality’ of the fish, of describing it object ...

sustains her and in her gratefulness for that epiph- any, she lets the fish continue on his way. Source:Leah Tieger, Critical Es ...

the Himalayas haunt many immature imagina- tions), but Bishop has a more primitive concep- tion of the physical world. Her ideas ...

hers sometimes acted as a subtle counterirritant— the softer inflections of his middle period were among the few signs that a po ...

The danger of this gift (every literary gift harboring disadvantages to offset its advantage) lies precisely in its quarantine o ...

pity / not to have seen’’ this or ‘‘not to have pon- dered’’ that—as she does in the beautiful poem called ‘‘Questions of Travel ...

sympathy with which Elizabeth Bishop approached a world which, however intently it is scanned, seems not to look back at us. In ...

conclusion, that ‘‘reality is a cliche ́’’ which the poet had better try to do without; on the contrary, she represents a consta ...

from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwa ...

Fragment 2 ‘‘Fragment 2’’ was composed by Sappho sometime in the sixth centuryBCE. Many of Sappho’s poems focus on love and marr ...