Going Deep: Art and the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop

When critic Randall Jarrell mentioned Vermeer in a review of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, Bishop excitedly expressed her joy over someone making the connection. We can only guess how she’d feel about Peggy Samuels’ Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art, in which the Drew University professor analyzes the influence of more modern artists such as Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters, and Alexander Calder on Bishop’s poetry. “From the late-1930s through the mid-1950s, Bishop drew on visual art intently to work out her own aesthetic,” Samuels asserts. Like a great quarterback, Samuels huddles up these visual artists and the poet and explains how they team up to create a whole new understanding of surface and depth in images and words. Deep Skin goes deep, and scores. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Going Deep."

[Many thanks to Cornell University Press for providing me with a review copy of Peggy Samuels’ Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art.]