Visits to St Elizabeths is a 1950 poem by Elizabeth Bishop 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 in the poem. Likewise the poem treats Pound ambivalently describing him by turns as "honored", "brave", "cruel", and "wretched" among other things.
Famous quotes containing the word visits:
“It so happened that, a few weeks later, “Old Ernie” [Ernest Hemingway] himself was using my room in New York as a hide-out from literary columnists and reporters during one of his rare stopover visits between Africa and Key West. On such all-too-rare occasions he lends an air of virility to my dainty apartment which I miss sorely after he has gone and all the furniture has been repaired.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)