Cold War 1950: Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath

This paper explores Sylvia Plath's and Elizabeth Bishop's responses to the U.S. entry into the Korean War in their poems "Bitter Strawberries" and "View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress," completed in 1950. I argue-through a reading informed by cultural, feminist, and lesbian theory, historical scholarship, and archival research-that both poets construct conflicted female-grounded voices that complicate our understanding of the traditional "Penelope" role for women during this war. I further contend that their poems draw our attention to the need to more fully account for women's heterogeneously interrelated visible, quasi-(in)visible, and invisible war positionings.(1).