Imagism

Although Elizabeth Bishop wasn’t formally associated with Imagism, many of her poems—“The Fish” included—may be read in relation to it. Imagism was a short-lived avant-garde poetry movement that lasted, roughly, from 1914 to 1917. Important figures in this movement included Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (who published as H.D.), and William Carlos Williams. By the early twentieth century, these and other poets had grown weary of the sentimentality and artifice that characterized the previous century’s poetry. Moving beyond the poetry of recent generations, this group of poets explored a new kind of verse that emphasized economy of language and directness of presentation. Key to this new form of poetry was a radical simplification of subject matter and scope. Instead of pursuing ambitious themes about love, life, death, and everything in between, these experimental poets sought to focus on a single image—or scene, or experience—and reveal something essential about it. This focus on a single image gave birth to the new movement’s name: Imagism. “The Fish” bears many of the telltale signs of an Imagist poem, including the directness of style, the economy of language, and precisely wrought imagery.

Nature Poetry

As a poem that spotlights the natural world’s capacity to inspire awe, “The Fish” stands in a long tradition of poetry devoted to nature. This tradition goes back to the pastoral poetry of Greek and Roman antiquity. Written by poets from urban centers, pastoral poems projected idealized images of the peaceful simplicity of shepherds’ lives in rural nature. Although pastoral poetry fell out of favor in the Middle Ages, it made a resurgence in the Renaissance and remained popular among neoclassical poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, British Romantic poets departed from conventionally pastoral depictions of nature. Instead of depending on highly idealized conventions for portraying rural life, the Romantics sought to forge more personalized, individual relationships with the natural world. Each in their different way, Romantic poets like William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Percy Shelley explored their own unique emotional and philosophical responses to nature’s beauty and sublimity. Across the Atlantic, the American Transcendentalists took a similarly serious approach to representing the relationship between humans and nature. Poets like Walt Whitman and philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson reframed the natural world as a wildly beautiful and divine frontier.