''Visits to St Elizabeths'' is a poem by
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Awar ...
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
Psychiatric hospitals, also known as mental health hospitals, behavioral health hospitals, are hospitals or wards specializing in the treatment of severe mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, dissociat ...
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
A poet laureate (plural: poets laureate) is a poet officially appointed by a government or conferring institution, typically expected to compose poems for special events and occasions. Albertino Mussato of Padua and Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch ...
) in 1949-50. The poem itself was written in 1956.
External links
Text of the poem
1956 poems
American poems
Cultural depictions of Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
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