Peripatetic Poetry: (Un-)generous Tributes and (Un-)endings in Leontia Flynn, Elizabeth Bishop, and W.B. Yeats

While we can demarcate the literal end of a poem on a piece of paper, the endings of poems are many and varied, and linked to their potentially un-ending conversations with other works. In the case of the Northern Irish poet Leontia Flynn, her conversations with Bishop are complex, finding expression in her sonnet “Elizabeth Bishop,” in the ways that she characterises Bishop, and in how she mediates between Bishop and W.B. Yeats. Both Flynn and Bishop are readers of Yeats, and they meet him at the level of poet and poem, complicating their relationships still further. Jonathan Ellis describes how Seamus Heaney wrote a “generous tribute” to Bishop in the form of a poem, but this article asks what happens when such “tributes” are more “ungenerous” in nature, and what they tell us about the ways in which Flynn, Bishop and Yeats speak to each other through their poems.