"Telling It Slant:" The "Healthier" Surrealism ofElizabeth Bishop and Joseph Cornell
Author
Suárez Toste, ErnestoDate
2001Abstract
Si bien suele asociarse a la poesía de Elizabeth Bishop con el surrealismo, es éste un aspecto
de su obra que continúa sin recibir la atención adecuada. Analizando su uso de personajes
infantiles en los poemas nos encontramos una serie de importantes paralelismos con el arte
del surrealista norteamericano Joseph Cornell, cuyas cajas reproducen —con tanta exactitud
como inquietante belleza— la sensación que experimentamos ante representaciones de la
muerte en contacto con el mundo de la infancia. En ambos autores la fragilidad de la vida
humana recibe un tratamiento similar, que parece tener origen en la iconografía pictórica
del siglo diecisiete, una de las influencias reconocidas por Bishop. Although Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry is often associated with surrealism, this aspect of her
work has not received enough attention. An analysis of the use of child perspective in her
poems shows remarkable similarities with the work of the American surrealist artist Joseph
Cornell, whose shadowboxes portray —accurately as well as beautifully— the uneasiness
produced by the theme of death in relation to childhood. The frailty of human life receives
a similar treatment in both authors, and this can be related to the iconography of seventeenth-
century painting, which is one of Bishop’s acknowledged influences.