Toshiaki Komura

Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England”:  Intertextual Projection in Modern Elegy

Elizabeth Bishop is known for her reticent, objectivist poetry, as well as for her aversion to poems of overtly confessional or biographical nature. Despite that, critics have long interpreted Bishop’s “Crusoe in England” as a covert elegy for her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares; Crusoe’s homosexual longing for the dead Friday is seen as a Freudian projection of Bishop’s grief over the loss of Lota, whereby the poem’s intertextuality-Bishop’s appropriation of Defoe’s character-acts as a screen that permits Bishop to address her personal struggle with the public taboo.

Instead of viewing the Freudian projection in “Crusoe in England” as an ego-defense screen, the present paper contends that the poem’s projection is a manifestation of the sublimatory thrust in modern anti-elegy.  That is, the poem’s consolation derives less from the feeling of release gained through the confession of unspeakable grief than from the non-consolatory fact that projection merely changes the form of a given experience. Projection-Bishop speaking through a lyric speaker speaking through Defoe’s character-creates an ambiguous space where the fact of loss is both exorcized and preserved in a changed, sublimated form.  Although this change in the form of loss offers, in itself, no consolation and is, hence, anti-elegiac, intertextual projection forges an illusion that the ongoing changes in the forms of an experience might, eventually, yield a consolatory form.  From this example, we may explore how projection can emerge as a byproduct of the elegy’s ongoing search for a consolation it has yet to discover.

Toshiaki Komura is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at University of Michigan.  He is currently writing a dissertation on 19th and 20th century elegy, provisionally titled Poetry of Lost Loss, Study of Modern Anti-Consolatory Elegy.  His paper on Wallace Stevens’s elegy was recently accepted for publication by English Literary History.