WSU’s Camille Roman with Library of Congress books on Elizabeth Bishop.

By Nella Letizia

Bent over her papers, Elizabeth Bishop wasn’t looking out the window that today garners a $1 million view. She focused instead on what she always did, her writing, not on the dome of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., which in 1949 contained the machinations of government officials ready to wage the Cold War. Bishop sat in profile to the camera, the nation’s poet laureate dressed in a power suit, as if protecting herself. What was she thinking about when the photographer opened the shutter?

WSU associate professor of English Camille Roman has written a book attempting to answer the question. Elizabeth Bishop’s World War II-Cold War View is the first comprehensive portrayal of the poet in mid-century America, tracing her life and writing from the war years in Key West, Fla., through her tenure as the 1949-50 national poet laureate at the Library of Congress.

“No one has looked at this part of her life,” she says. “What happens if you’re a poet in this national position and a woman? She’s the second woman to hold the laureate traditionally held by white men.”

Bishop held the laureate when Communist fear and the career-killing accusations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities threatened arts in all forms. Immediately after Bishop’s year on Capitol Hill, poets Langston Hughes and William Carlos Williams were denied their laureateships because of their supposed Communist connections.

It’s not surprising, then, that Bishop hated her stay in Washington, D.C. She likened her year there to that of poet Robert Lowell, who compared the consultancy to his imprisonment as a conscientious objector during World War II, according to Roman. Bishop wrote “A View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress,” a poem about the infamous dome and the sounds of the Air Force Band playing: “Unceasingly the little flags / feed their limp stripes into the air, / and the band’s efforts vanish there.” Roman’s readings of Bishop’s journal during that time reveal a whimsy not typical of the poet. Case in point, Bishop nicknames the Capitol dome the “sugar teat,” a seemingly unlimited resource for the Pentagon’s thirst of the times.

“She doesn’t withhold her punches, but she knew she couldn’t publish them,” Roman says.

The fervor surrounding the Cold Ward disturbed Bishop for another reason—the poet had lived through cycles of war many times, Roman says. World War I raged in her childhood years; during World War II, she lived in Key West, used as a military base to guard the Caribbean. Her adult prime coincided with the Korean War. Bishop fled to Brazil after her poet laureateship was over only to watch civil war embroil the country a decade later. She returned to a United States engaged in the Vietnam War during the mid-1960s, going to the University of Washington to teach.

“This cycle of war is global,” Roman says. “We need to find another way to negotiate our conflicts. My students are searching very consciously for new solutions. Their future rests on global cooperation, not conflict.”

Roman’s book is also a detective story where all clues point inward. The WSU professor shares several similarities with the poet. Roman was born just outside of Washington, D.C., when Bishop was looking outside her Library of Congress window at the Capitol dome. Roman’s parents, both professional musicians and educators, were hypersensitive to the politics of the time. Roman came of age during the Vietnam War at the University of Michigan where she would earn a bachelor’s degree in journalism. Finally, Roman, like Bishop, came to Washington state to teach poetry to new generations of artists.

“It’s a little bit like coming home,” Roman says of writing Bishop’s story. “I’m rethinking my own history during a war and as a journalist. I’m beginning to see how all that came together after all these years.

“I admire Bishop’s great rhetorical abilities. She reveals and conceals herself equally well, something as women we sometimes have to learn the hard way.”