Crusoe in England

“Crusoe in England” is part of a long literary tradition of retelling famous stories with a contemporary perspective. Poets such as Charles E. Carryl have retold Crusoe’s story as early as 1885. This form of literary retelling, however, reached its apex with Modernist works. James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses retells Homer’s Odyssey in 1910s Dublin, and T. S. Eliot’s 1917 poem The Waste Land retells the story of the Fisher King in his contemporary America.

Bishop’s poem, like many Modernist retellings of old stories, uses anachronistic details and settings as a way to enhance and modernize the work. The Wordsworth poem that Crusoe struggles to remember, for instance, was published 85 years after Daniel Defoe’s 1719 The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Bishop also modernizes the language that Crusoe speaks, and she employs informal turns of phrase such as “the poems—well, I tried” (Line 94) to rid Crusoe’s story of Defoe’s formal prose. The greater emphasis on the main character’s consciousness is another marker of these Modernist retellings. Though Defoe broke new ground in revealing Crusoe’s internal life, Bishop’s exploration of Crusoe’s emotions is wholly modern.