The Attack on Surrealism in Elizabeth Bishop's Darwin Letter‪.‬

In the mid-sixties, while writing what was to be the first book-length study of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, Anne Stevenson sent Bishop a rough outline of the book's chapters. The second of these was to be called "The Artist," and, in it, Stevenson draws a likeness between Bishop's art and that of "the surrealists and the symbolists too," proposing that, like "Klee and Ernst," Bishop uses a great deal of "hallucinatory and dream material," and that, like them, she does so in the belief that "there is no split personality, but rather a sensitivity that extends equally into the sub-conscious and the conscious world" (Stevenson to Bishop, 28 October 1963). Bishop's reply to Stevenson has become quite famous: In this sometimes cryptic reply, Bishop agrees with Stevenson about the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious, but, without ever really saying so, denies that this belief is something she shares with the surrealists. The agreement is quite obvious--"Yes, I agree"--but the denial is more complicated, and, in many ways, much more interesting.