18 pages • 36 minutes read
Crusoe in England
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Background
Literary Context
“Crusoe in England” is part of a long literary tradition of retelling famous stories with a contemporary perspective. Poets such as Charles E. Carryl have retold Crusoe’s story as early as 1885. This form of literary retelling, however, reached its apex with Modernist works. James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses retells Homer’s Odyssey in 1910s Dublin, and T. S. Eliot’s 1917 poem The Waste Land retells the story of the Fisher King in his contemporary America.
Bishop’s poem, like many Modernist retellings of old stories, uses anachronistic details and settings as a way to enhance and modernize the work. The Wordsworth poem that Crusoe struggles to remember, for instance, was published 85 years after Daniel Defoe’s 1719 The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Bishop also modernizes the language that Crusoe speaks, and she employs informal turns of phrase such as “the poems—well, I tried” (Line 94) to rid Crusoe’s story of Defoe’s formal prose. The greater emphasis on the main character’s consciousness is another marker of these Modernist retellings. Though Defoe broke new ground in revealing Crusoe’s internal life, Bishop’s exploration of Crusoe’s emotions is wholly modern.
Authorial Context
Bishop rarely writes about her own life and conceals herself within her poetry. Nonetheless, “Crusoe in England” meditates on many of the themes present in Bishop’s own biography. By the time Bishop published “Crusoe in England,” she was removed from the most important places in her life. The landscapes of Nova Scotia, which inspired poem like “The Moose” and “First Death in Nova Scotia,” stayed with Bishop throughout her career. The experiences of living in Brazil, which she writes about in poems such as “Arrival at Santos,” are also only memories when she publishes “Crusoe in England.”
The few sources on Bishop’s life suggests that she lived a solitary existence, not dissimilar to Crusoe’s both on and off his island. Bishop’s continued engagement with Nova Scotia as a setting for her work also suggests that she felt similarly displaced. The reference to “Mont d’Espoir or Mount Despair” (Line 118), is a possible reference to Newfoundland, an Atlantic Canadian province close to Nova Scotia. Bay D’Espoir is on the southern coast of Newfoundland and is pronounced Bay Despair by residents in the same mistaken Anglicization of the french d’espoir. Bishop might have found an outlet for her own sense of solitude and displacement later in life through Crusoe’s story.
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