Visits to St. Elizabeths

Poem

Visits to St Elizabeths is a poem by Elizabeth Bishop modelled on the English nursery rhyme This is the house that Jack built. The poem refers to the confinement between 1945 and 1958 of Ezra Pound in St Elizabeths Hospital, Washington, D.C. The nursery rhyme style gives an unusual effect to the strange or unsettling descriptions of a psychiatric hospital in the poem. Likewise the poem treats Pound ambivalently describing him by turns as "honored", "brave", "cruel", and "wretched" among other things.

The poem draws on Bishop's visits to Pound during the year she spent in Washington as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a position now known as Poet Laureate) in 1949-50. The poem itself was written in 1956.

## External links

[edit]

* Text of the poem

* v
* t
* e

Ezra Pound

Poetry|

* A Lume Spento (July 1908)
* A Quinzaine for this Yule (December 1908)
* "Ballad of the Goodly Fere" (1909)
* Ripostes (1912)
* "In a Station of the Metro" (1913)
* Cathay (1915)
* "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter"
* Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)
* The Cantos (1917–1968)
* Cultural references in The Cantos

Other works|

* The Spirit of Romance (1910)
* Des Imagistes (1914)
* ABC of Reading (1934)
* Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1935)
* Guide to Kulchur (1938)
* Radio broadcasts, 1941–1945
* If This Be Treason (1948)

Concepts|

* Ideogrammic method
* Imagism
* Parable of the Sunfish
* Periplum
* Three Kinds of Poetry
* Vorticism

Family|

* William Wadsworth (maternal ancestor)
* Thaddeus C. Pound (grandfather)
* Dorothy Shakespear (wife)
* Omar Pound (son)
* Olivia Shakespear (mother-in-law)
* Olga Rudge (partner)
* Mary de Rachewiltz (daughter)
* Boris de Rachewiltz (son-in-law)

Literary circle|

* Richard Aldington
* E. E. Cummings
* H.D.
* T. S. Eliot
* Ford Madox Ford
* Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
* Ernest Hemingway
* T. E. Hulme
* James Joyce
* James Laughlin
* New Directions
* Wyndham Lewis
* Archibald MacLeish
* Charles Elkin Mathews
* William Brooke Smith
* Allen Tate
* William Carlos Williams
* W. B. Yeats

Works about|

* Discretions
* The Pound Era
* Reading Pound Reading
* "Visits to St. Elizabeths"
* A ZBC of Ezra Pound

Miscellaneous|

* Blast
* Brunnenburg
* CasaPound
* Julien Cornell
* Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound
* Hugh Kenner
* Ezra Pound (Lewis)
* Famous Last Words
* Modernism
* St. Elizabeths Hospital
* Vienna Café

This article related to a poem from the 1950s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

|

* v
* t
* e

*[v]: View this template
*[t]: Discuss this template
*[e]: Edit this template