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from Part V - Identity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2021
Elizabeth Bishop’s humor warily bridges gaps between subjectivities. As “12 O’Clock News,” “One Art” and “Filling Station” show, the comic moments in her poems present simultaneous, apparently incompatible interpretations of the world and help us gain insight into the unfamiliar minds behind those interpretations. Her humorous asides, wry ironies and satirical critiques help her hold competing ideas in double exposure: her levity presents varying viewpoints without taking sides. Her humor fuses empathy with judgment, as her subjects’ and speakers’ frailties are to be both rejected and felt as our own. At the same time, her work explores the similarities between humor and poetry. Poems show us relationships among apparently incommensurable objects and help us gain insight into the minds of others. They do this by valorizing ambiguity and flux, allowing us to juxtapose apparently incompatible ideas and thus gain access to other subjectivities without losing track of our own.
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