Education For All

In the final lecture of the course, Elizabeth Bishop's "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance" is considered with an emphasis on Bishop's ambivalence towards the notion of home. The idea that modernists use poetry to do the work that religion no longer does is reflected upon, and connections are drawn between Bishop, Frost, Eliot, Stevens, and Crane. Bishop's "Visits to St. Elizabeth's" is considered as a formal rebuke to the ambitions of modernism alongside Auden's statement that "poetry makes nothing happen" but ultimately the two poets are shown to offer poetry as a solution to modern alienation in its capacity to renew human community through communication.