Colloquial Language In The Poetry Of Elizabeth Bishop's Poetry

To me, Elizabeth Bishop's poetry is the definition of intense. She describes things with such feeling and intensity that it is hard to not be intrigued by her poetry. In this essay, I will be discussing Bishop's ability of seeing greatness in ordinary things. I will talk about how she often uses colloquial language in her poetry. I plan to dicuss her use of vividly clear descriptions which help to make her poetry come alive on the page. Finally, I am going to review the poetic techniqes that Bishop uses to bring interesting element to her poems.

Elizabeth Bishop has a remarkable skill of being able to see the extraordinary in the ordinary and she does this quite a lot in her poetry. Her celebrations of the ordinary are an unusual yet appealing aspect and everyday scenes are transformed. In the poem 'Filling Station', Bishop takes the normal and ordinary things in the filling station, like the embroidered doily and the plants, and shows meaning behind it. I think she wanted

She presents things in a rational way, just as she sees it infront of her. In the poem 'The Fish', Bishop's admiration for this animal is based in reality. She does not romanticise the animal. He is shown in a realistic way, she does not show the beauty of the fish. "I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony". For me, this solidified Bishop's unusual and engaging style of writing. In the poem 'The Prodigal', Bishop describes the smell in the pigsty so clearly that it is almost like we are there with the prodigal son. "The brown enormous odor he lived by was too close, with its breathing and thick hair, for him to judge". Those few lines depict such revulsion so clearly that it is so easy for the reader to visualise the