James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Emergency of Literary Form

Abstract

This essay is written as a tribute to James Merrill and Elizabeth Bishop arguing that the poetry they wrote in 1970s shows how lyric can be used as a rhetorical form through which not just to criticize but to refuse conventional narratives of historical continuity and accountability. The essay attempts to reawaken for our present Simone Weil's use of Homer's Iliad in her 1941–42 essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force” to passionately center the question of language and the exterminatory violence of power. It proposes the present relevance of the argument that the absolute violence of war constitutes for literature a continuing, ultimate emergency of literary form. Without attributing any such motive or intentional project to them, this essay argues that Merrill and Bishop's innovations in lyric anticipated the sound of an inconsolability that humanism must now squarely confront.