“Like an Old-Fashioned School-Book”: Geography III and Object Teaching

This article discusses the role of the epigraph from James Monteith’s First Lessons in Geography that Elizabeth Bishop included in her last book of poems Geography III. It traces the source of the epigraph and the history of how it found its way into Bishop’s book and argues that together with the volume’s title and the book’s design, the epigraph stresses the work’s “school-book” quality. It suggests that Geography III can be seen as an alternative take on nineteenth-century object lessons and that it presents objects and the whole world not as stable, solid, and fully understandable, but as elusive, chaotic, confusing, and defiant, and our situation among them as precarious. This way of seeing things makes the book of poems a more authentic source of knowledge than the textbook it interacts with.