ABSTRACT
My title does not, on the face of it, speak to our conference question. Indeed, both the title and topics of this paper emerged in a happenstance way. “Picturing Pleasure” was my on-the-spot reply to John Guillory’s plea to help him satisfy the English Institute’s urgent request for early program copy. When the phone rang, I was reading Elizabeth Bishop, getting ready for next day’s class. I had never taught Bishop before and was doing so now only because pressed into service by the graduate students. In order to get my bearings on a poetry I knew only casually, I had paired Bishop with Wordsworth, a poet who, for me (and it would seem for Bishop too) sets the standard for modern lyric. I defended the move by citing Bishop’s ironic but revealing selfcharacterization as a “minor, female Wordsworth.”1
