19 pages • 38 minutes read
Elizabeth BishopThe Imaginary Iceberg
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1946A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context
Bishop is unique among her contemporaries for her tendency to hide herself in her poetry. “The Imaginary Iceberg,” however, is an interesting counterexample to this tendency. The poem’s themes surrounding travel, stillness, and the imagination, reflect many of the changes in Bishop’s life. Bishop’s turbulent childhood (See: Poet Biography) meant she often travelled between home and relatives. Her affection for Nova Scotia and the Atlantic Ocean, where icebergs are frequently spotted, began after she moved there to live with her maternal grandparents.
Many of the poems in North & South—in which “The Imaginary Iceberg” appeared in 1946—were first drafted between 1934 and 1937. “The Imaginary Iceberg” is one of the earliest poems Bishop wrote during this period. After graduating Vassar College in 1934, Bishop traveled across Europe and Northern Africa. Though she continued to travel for two years after writing “The Imaginary Iceberg,” the poem’s account of stillness suggests she longed for a stability that travel could not provide. As the speaker says in the poem’s first two lines, they would “rather have the iceberg than the ship, / although it meant the end of travel” (Lines 1-2).
Literary Context
Bishop occupies a unique place in literary history. She is among the most celebrated 20th century poets. This period of literary history is defined by the succession and co-habitation of various literary movements under the modernist banner such as the imagists, the objectivist poets, the Beats, and the confessional poets. While these movements, and others, were present during Bishop’s career—and seminal confessional poet Robert Lowell was Bishop’s close friend—Bishop rarely engaged with the tropes and conventions of contemporary movements. Bishop actively resisted attempts to categorize her works, and refused to be published in all-female anthologies.
Instead of engaging in the formal experimentation defining her era, Bishop wrote in relatively conventional free-verse. “The Imaginary Iceberg,” for instance, opens in iambic pentameter and remains roughly iambic throughout (See: Literary Devices). Later in her career, Bishop turned to more formal, more restrictive forms such as the sestina and the villanelle.
Bishop’s poetry is more influenced by formally strict Victorian and romantic writers than by her contemporaries. This romantic influence also pervades Bishop’s engagement with the natural world. The romantics saw nature as created by the Christian god, and therefore worthy of attention and worship. This kind of divine attention is exactly what Bishop draws upon when the speaker of her poem states that “Icebergs behoove the soul” (Line 32). Moreover, the English romantics existed in a time of limited travel, and championed the imagination as a way of escaping their island nation. This idea of the imagination’s power—and superiority—over physical travel also bleeds into Bishop’s poem.
Bishop diverges from the romantics in the delivery of the iceberg’s revelation. The romantic emphasis on individuality falls short in Bishop’s poem. Instead, Bishop’s speaker is a collective “We” (Line 1) that cannot be conflated to a particular individual. Bishop’s ship sails to a place of melding and coexistence “where waves give in to one another’s waves” (Line 30).
Related Titles
By Elizabeth Bishop
