Morris Bishop

The review of Bishop's book Pascal: The Life of Genius (1936) in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called it "the first complete description of Pascal as man and as historical figure to appear in English", and praised it highly, particularly for its lively description of the dispute between the Jesuits and Port-Royal.[24] The New York Times review described it as "a solid, comprehensive and valuable addition to the library" with "a heroic attempt to explain the achievements of Pascal as a scientist, philosopher and theologian", and praised Bishop's enthusiasm in writing about Pascal.[25]

The Romance studies scholar Arthur Livingston admired the book as a literary biography, particularly for the way in which Bishop "follows the motive of the 'child prodigy' through the varied influences of that fact in Pascal's life upon his temperament, his moral outlook and the various episodes of his career"—a viewpoint Livingston thought led to perceptiveness and fairness. But Livingston criticized what he saw as Bishop's unnecessary dalliance with "a rather timid Freudianism". He claimed that Pascal evolved "[from] a prig into a charlatan", that his learning is obsolete, and "It is in recovering Pascal the poet and artist from the dross of his biography and his thought that Professor Bishop's criticism is perhaps least effective". Yet Livingston concluded by praising the book as suggestive, comprehensive, and thorough.[26]

The reviewer for Isis found that Bishop "succeeds in painting an objective as well as an enthusiastic picture";[27] for the reviewer for The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, "Dr. Bishop has written a scholarly and a brilliantly written book, one which every admirer of Pascal will read with pleasure."[28] The review in Philosophy called the book an "altogether admirable biography", both critical and sympathetic;[29] the reviewer for The Journal of Philosophy thought it should appeal to philosophers as "a well-organized collection of Pascaliana", commenting that "It is unfortunate that [Bishop's] stylistic exuberance sometimes gets the better of him, but for the most part he keeps it under control."[30]

Bishop's Blaise Pascal (a 1966 mass-market paperback) followed a brief description of Pascal's life with a selection of his writings.[31]

Invited to name the outstanding book of the period 1931 to 1961, Bishop named his own Pascal: The Life of Genius, saying that its preparation had taught him much. "There is a useful lesson here: if you want to find out about something of which you know nothing, write a book about it."[32]

Reviewing Love Rimes of Petrarch (1932), Romeyn Berry enjoyed the opportunity Petrarch gave Bishop to write lyrical poetry: though unable to read the Italian, Berry thought it "safe to assume that in such a satisfying bit of metrical translation there must be much of both [Petrarch and Bishop]".[33]

The review in Saturday Review of Literature of Petrarch and His World (1963) said that "Bishop's sometimes iconoclastic approach distinguishes his magnificent new biography of Petrarch from the hero-worshipping books about the poet".[34] The review in Italica praised the book both as "a scholarly work cleverly concealed behind a sophisticated, witty, and often ironic prose", and for providing "a complete picture of Petrarch's long life, the many aspects of his character, and a scholarly analysis of the wide range of his writings".[35] That in The Historian noted that half of the book was derived from a series of lectures ("the Patten Lectures at Indiana University during the Spring of 1962"), resulting in a style more conversational than would normally be expected: in general a plus, but occasionally to jarring effect.[36] The Shakespeare scholar M. C. Bradbrook found the biography "engaging".[37] The reviewer for the Canadian Journal of History described the book as "a gracefully written, very readable biography". In places its inferences are debatable, he added, but "some of Bishop's judgements are devastatingly perceptive". He concluded, "In Bishop's hands, Petrarch should come alive for all readers."[38] The review in Renaissance News praised Bishop for "[having] managed to find a human being at the heart of [the superabundance of Petrarch's life] and to treat him kindly as well as sanely", and praised the book for its informativeness and interest and the gracefulness of its translations.[39] The New York Times' regular book reviewer Orville Prescott described the book as "scholarly and yet lively" with "many smoothly flowing translations", yet suggested that it might be found too long to be read cover to cover.[40] The reviewer for Speculum conceded that the book had some brilliant ingredients but compared it unfavourably with one by the Petrarch specialist Ernest H. Wilkins,[lower-roman 9] which was more painstaking, "equally vivid and even more so", and "emerges with something solid"; whereas Bishop failed to provide a coherent picture of Petrarch or even to give the impression that he possessed one.[41]

Bishop translated Petrarch's letters (selected from both the Familiares and the Seniles, and elsewhere) from Latin for Letters from Petrarch (1966). Mark Musa, a scholar of Italian literature, thought it an "elegant" translation—one that "captured the spirit and tone of the poet's Latin letters".[42] The review for Renaissance Quarterly, whose author estimated that the content represented "about one tenth" of Petrarch's surviving letters, started:

This is a book for students of comparative literature who do not read Latin (if there are any). It is also for the undergraduate member of Renaissance literature or Renaissance history courses. It is most definitely for the general reader, who will probably not read it.[43]

The review continued by saying that Bishop's book complemented James Harvey Robinson and Henry Winchester Rolfe's Petrarch the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters (1898), the latter remaining "most valuable" despite its stilted translations. The review for The Modern Language Journal (MLJ) regretted abridgements and liberties with the translations, but concluded by praising the book as "a worthy effort to bring material not easily accessible to the attention of the cultured laymen for whom it is intended. The translation is eminently readable and is distinguished by the elegance which we have come to expect of Professor Bishop. . . ."[44] The reviews in both the Renaissance Quarterly and MLJ noted that the letters seemed to have been selected to fit Bishop's interests, or those of the educated lay reader, rather than to represent a more rounded picture of Petrarch's concerns.

In a review of Bishop's Ronsard: Prince of Poets (1940), the French literature scholar Justin O'Brien pointed out that this book—a combination of a biography and critical study of Ronsard and a collection of translations—"is not . . . for specialists. It is written rather for you and me." O'Brien particularly praised Bishop's verse translations of "all of the ten or a dozen deathless lyrics on which Ronsard's fame principally rests, and many other poems as well". He noted how Bishop made Ronsard not just a historical figure but a poet for the mid-20th century.[45]

A second French literature scholar, H. W. Lawton, wrote that Bishop "has succeeded . . . in enlivening and making real the successive stages of Ronsard's development. As a work of literary criticism, the book is less satisfactory. . . ." He concluded that the book "may help some beginner to look on the right side of Ronsard's poetry and serve as an antidote to too much dead-handed analysis".[46]

The reviewer for Thought found the biography one-sided and the book unscholarly as a whole, but had high praise for the translations.[47] The reviewer for Modern Language Notes found various points on which to disagree with Bishop, but nevertheless concluded that this "work of vulgarization" was "an entertaining and useful book".[48]

In a review of Bishop's 1951 book The Life and Adventures of La Rochefoucauld, the literary critic F. W. Dupee held that La Rochefoucauld's Maxims are "the essentially impersonal product of a definite method", [which Louis Kronenberger] 'defined as a scientific cynicism . . . which tested vanity in a test-tube'"—and that Bishop, who had little regard for the maxims, misunderstood them. But Dupee nevertheless praised the "engaging detail" of the book, and particularly its portrayal of La Rochefoucauld's final years.[49]

Two other reviewers praised the book for the inferences it draws from the maxims.[50][51]

Bishop's two-volume anthology of French texts, A Survey of French Literature (1955), was praised in The French Review for its selection and for the short piece Bishop writes about each author, in which he "displays a great gift for getting at essentials . . . His comments are invariably apt [and designed] as suggestions or challenges" for the student reader.[52]

The 1965 revised edition made changes to the selections and slightly augmented the annotations. Despite quibbles with certain points, the reviewer for The Modern Language Journal wrote that it had recently had only one significant rival and that the newly revised work was "the anthology in my opinion".[53]

The third edition (2005–2006), revised by Kenneth T. Rivers and in five volumes, again changed the selections and increased the annotations.[54][55] A review of the new volume on the 18th century found Bishop's original critical commentary "precise, concise, and lively", though in some places old-fashioned.[56]

Bishop's 1950 translation of Molière's play The Would-Be Invalid was later staged. A reviewer of a performance in 2003 found the text "an odd combination of overly earnest speeches and jangling contemporary references".[57]

Eight Plays by Molière in Bishop's translation—The Precious Damsels, The School for Wives, The Critique of The School for Wives, The Versailles Impromptu, Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, The Physician in Spite of Himself, The Would-Be Gentleman—appeared as a volume of the Modern Library in 1957. The reviewer for The French Review found the translations of Molière "brilliant", and praised Bishop's short introduction to each play.[58] The reviewer for The Modern Language Journal found "infrequent disappointments" with Bishop's translations, but supposed that the book would be "genuinely useful".[59][lower-roman 10]

Before Bishop's translations of Molière into English, those most commonly used had been the "really bad" Modern Library selection by Henri van Laun, who according to the French literature scholar Donald Frame "had a genuine talent for dullness". Together with the poet Richard Wilbur's rhymed translation of Misanthrope, Bishop's nine unrhymed translations appeared to Frame, on their publication in the 1950s, as great improvements. But Frame, who would later translate Molière himself, preferred rhyme for translating Molière, and Wilbur's translation to Bishop's, and was "puzzled that Morris Bishop, a connoisseur of Molière and superb comic poet (Spilt Milk, 'Ozymandias Revisited'), did not put him into rhyme".[60]

From 1970 to 1971 Bishop published a series of four "storybooks" (each illustrated with line drawings by his wife, Alison Mason Kingsbury). A Classical Storybook offered stories in lively English translation (often Bishop's own) from Greek and Latin. A review in Greece & Rome said: "Certainly it is not elementary . . . (although children will read it with avidity)."[61] A review in The Classical Outlook praised the variety of the content and the vividness of the picture it provided.[62]

A review in The American Scholar had high praise for A Medieval Storybook: "[T]he tales share that glorious sense of improbability that is the very essence of a good storybook"; and "The only possible basis for selection of stories for a collection of this sort is the personal taste of the author, and Mr. Bishop's choice is splendid." But the claims on the jacket that the stories "vary widely in theme and their characters represent every class of medieval society . . . [and that] Mr. Bishop's tales vividly illustrate medieval life and thought" struck the reviewer as "quite unjustified, as Mr. Bishop knows very well". The reviewer regretted both the lack of an effort to avoid misinterpretation and Bishop's use of "Wardour-Street English".[63]

Much of A Renaissance Storybook consisted of translations by Bishop from the Italian.[64] A Romantic Storybook has been called "a delightful collection".[65]

Bishop's 1929 edition of Voltaire's Candide and Other Philosophical Tales presented Candide, Le Monde comme il va, L'Histoire d'un bon bramin, and L'Ingénu with a small amount of commentary and notes.[66] A reviewer of the 1957 edition (reissued in 1962) found that the editor's introduction and notes were "enlightening and lively".[67]

The review in The Modern Language Journal of Bishop's edition (1933) of Casanova's L'Évasion des Plombs first reassured readers that the book "would pass the most puritanical censorship". It praised "this virile escapade", while pointing out that, even with Bishop's footnotes, the book was for the experienced reader of French.[68]

"Le Roman de vrai amour" and "Le Pleur de sainte âme" (1958), edited by Bishop's student Arthur S. Bates, presents a pair of poems, known only from a manuscript Bishop had discovered twenty years earlier in Cornell University library,[lower-roman 11] of "late medieval devotional verse in monorimed alexandrine quatrains [that] possess the absurd but delicate charm of decadent piety". In one chapter Bishop "undertakes the unlikely task of finding sources and analogues for the content of the poems in the literary and mystical currents of the Middle Ages".[69] The reviewer for The Modern Language Review found the chapter "interesting".[70]

Of Bishop's posthumously published Saint Francis of Assisi, the anonymous reviewer for Kirkus Reviews wrote that:

It is not the saint that interests him but the paradoxical and eminently human man. Bishop suggests that much of Francis' celebrated asceticism derived less from his piety than from his irrepressible sense of theatrics. . . . Not the last word in scholarship, this is nonetheless a psychologically convincing portrait . . . . endearing and empathetic.[71]

A much later survey of the American reception of Francis of Assisi judged that "the book is derivative and generally undistinguished".[72]

Bishop also published articles on other writers: as examples, Chateaubriand[73] and Dante[74] At the time of his death, he was working on a biography of Cola di Rienzo.[6][75][76]

The earliest of Bishop's biographies was The Odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca (1933). This book on the Spanish explorer was praised in North American Review.[77] The review in The New York Times concluded: "Despite an overwhelming mass of detail and despite the fact that most of his characters are unknown to the general reader, [Bishop] has made de Vaca live; and one feels admiration and indignation, as though the issues involved were things of yesterday."[78]

Comparing the book with John Eoghan Kelly's Pedro de Alvarado Conquistator, the poet Theodore Maynard wrote that "[Bishop's] style is not distinguished, but is at least vivacious", praising the book as entertaining but regretting that Bishop "indulges his propensity for fanciful speculation".[79] The reviewer for The Journal of Modern History found it a "highly entertaining and instructive narrative".[80] The reviews in both The Hispanic American Historical Review and The Journal of Negro History pointed out various problems; yet the former concluded that the book was largely accurate as well as "delightfully written",[81] and the latter that the book was "a brilliant piece of historical research".[82]

Just six years after publication of his book, Bishop himself acknowledged the superiority of a newly published alternative, writing that Cleve Hallenbeck "has produced the best informed and best argued study of Cabeza de Vaca's route that has ever been made".[83]

More recently Bishop's book has been criticized. The authors of a larger biography of de Vaca published in 1999 give their predecessors, and particularly Bishop and Enrique Pupo-Walker, "low marks for shoddy research and implausible or plainly erroneous readings and interpretations".[84] A 2013 paper describes Bishop's book as "a breezy narrative about Cabeza de Vaca, spiced with imaginary dialogue"; saying that it "made no attempt to advance a new route interpretation. Instead, Bishop accepted the conclusions of [Harbert] Davenport and [Joseph K.] Wells set forth some fourteen years earlier".[85]

The archaeologist Arthur C. Parker praised Bishop's 1948 biography of the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, Champlain: The Life of Fortitude, as "a good and straightforward account of a mighty hero [that is nevertheless] as exciting as a bit of romance literature", and for making Champlain understandable without running to excessive length.[86] In The New York Times, the book was praised highly both by Orville Prescott ("lively and scholarly", "excellent")[87] and by John A. Krout ("spirited", "Mr. Bishop's spirited imagination evokes from the record a man whose motives are understandable and whose character shines through both failure and success").[88] The economic historian Irene Spry wrote that although Bishop told Champlain's tale "in a sometimes jarringly skittish style [the book] is based on a serious study of first-hand sources and is full both of human and geographic interest".[89] The review in Queen's Quarterly started by saying that the book "might equally well have been entitled Champlain Taken Down off His Monument and Made Human"; regretting that Canadian historians approached figures such as Champlain with humility, even servility; whereas Bishop was able to do so with "good-humoured intimacy"—the result was a "charming book".[90] Though faulting the book for fabricated conversations and minor errors, the historian E.R. Adair praised it as providing "constant interest and pleasure".[91] The historian Milo M. Quaife also criticized Bishop's exercise of his imagination, but nevertheless said that the book "will be a worthy and entertaining addition to the bookshelf of anyone who cares to read about the American past".[92] The review in The American Historical Review described it as an "unpretentious but thoroughly informed and judicious book";[93] the psychologist Elsie Murray called it "a rare blend of psychological acumen and careful scholarship".[94] The historian Grace Lee Nute was much less appreciative: "[N]o one should be misled into believing that this is a scholarly or definitive life of the great explorer, or that it adds anything of note to our knowledge of Champlain's life and achievements." She also found its written style monotonous.[95]

Bishop's White Men Came to the St. Lawrence (1961) earned a dismissive mention in a survey of the literature of colonialism that classed it with Les Canadiens d'autrefois of Robert de Roquebrune as likely to appeal to the general public and schoolchildren.[96] However, the novelist Robertson Davies greatly enjoyed the book "[a]s an introduction to the history of exploration in Canada", writing that he wished he had been present at Bishop's lectures on which it was based.[97]

Bishop's The Horizon Book of the Middle Ages takes its title from its American publisher's lavish periodical Horizon. The book was published in 1968 to complement The Horizon Book of Great Cathedrals (edited by Jay Jacobs), the pair constituting The Horizon History of the Medieval World. Bishop's volume was "a work of impeccable scholarship and sprightly of style".[98]

The Horizon Book of the Middle Ages spans a millennium, from the 5th to the 16th century. "The narrative focuses on the minutiae of everyday living", and a reviewer judged that, together with the volume on cathedrals, the book would be "richly rewarding" both for those with specialist backgrounds and for "anybody with an inquiring mind".[99]

The book was later republished as The Middle Ages, The Penguin Book of the Middle Ages, and The Pelican Book of the Middle Ages.

Before the publication in 1962 of Bishop's A History of Cornell, the university had just two histories: Cornell University: Founders and the Founding (1943), a highly regarded account by Carl Becker of the period before the arrival of its first students; and Waterman Thomas Hewett's plodding Cornell University: A History (1905).[8][lower-roman 12]

Cornell's president, Deane Malott, named Bishop the second University Historian (after Becker) and relieved him of teaching duties for a year so he could produce a history in time for the university's centenary. Bishop completed the research for and writing of the two-volume work A History of Cornell (1962) within three or four months.[4]

Frederick Rudolph's review of the work started: "Seldom in the writing of college and university history have responsible scholarship, felicitous writing, and the warmth and wisdom that come from knowing one's subject been so happily combined"; it continued with similarly glowing commentary.[100]

The review in The Journal of Higher Education said that: "Although written in a style to interest the general reader, the concentration inward—on the physical and educational development of the University, omitting any extended treatment of the larger social and academic context—makes it a book primarily for Cornellians." The writer regretted this, but observed that the hundredth anniversaries of a number of the land-grant universities would soon arrive and might prompt a number of similar, single-institution histories, on the bases of which more general histories could be written.[101]

History of Education Quarterly's reviewer had high praise for Bishop's portrayal of the founders, Ezra Cornell and Andrew D. White, and indeed for the book as a whole, not least for its "substantial sketches of the wider social, intellectual, and cultural contexts within which [the university's] leaders dreamed and worked".[102]

The review in the Washington, D.C. Evening Star found the history an unusually absorbing example of its genre, thanks to the distinctiveness of both the university and the author. "Prof. Bishop's sonorous almost victorian style is vividly evocative. . . . [His] account is more than even the most captious reader could ask."[103]

The first part of the work was reissued in 1967 as Early Cornell, 1865–1900. It was reviewed in British Journal of Educational Studies together with Becker's Cornell University: Founders and the Founding. The reviewer wrote that Becker's work was more likely to appeal to the general reader—Bishop's book being "more reverent"—but that both constituted "a fitting tribute to a prestige institution".[104]

A History of Cornell retained its high reputation decades after it was published.[105][106]

Bishop had high regard for light verse:

The aim of poetry, or Heavy Verse, is to seek understanding in forms of beauty. The aim of light verse is to promote misunderstanding in beauty's cast-off clothes. But even misunderstanding is a kind of understanding; it is an analysis, an observation of truth, which sneaks around truth from the rear, which uncovers the lath and plaster of beauty's hinder parts.[107]

Bishop's obituary in The New York Times describes him as "an extraordinarily gifted writer" of light verse, publishing "about fifteen poems and casuals a year in the New Yorker" over a period of more than thirty years.[6][lower-roman 13] Bishop also published verse in The Saturday Evening Post,[3] Archaeology,[108] Poetry, The Colonnade, The Measure, The Smart Set, Judge, Saturday Review of Literature and the pre-Luce Life.[20]

After noting how light verse had almost completely vanished from the magazines that had previously published it, David McCord (himself an exponent) wrote:

But from the twenties on down into the fifties there was Morris Bishop, the one true poet at heart who moved with almost elfin grace amid, yet superior to, the difficulties of an art traditionally chained and fettered by strict rhyme and meter.[109]^: 6

Writing in 1960, Richard Armour put Bishop together with F.P.A., Margaret Fishback, Arthur Guiterman, Samuel Hoffenstein, Ethel Jacobson, David McCord, Phyllis McGinley, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, E.B. White, and John Updike as "the old (and middle-aged) masters of light verse" that a would-be writer of light verse should study.[110]

"How to Treat Elves",[lower-roman 14] a widely anthologized poem,[111] describes a conversation with "The wee-est little elf". The elf tells the narrator "'I dance 'n fwolic about . . . 'n scuttle about and play.'" In four stanzas he describes himself surprising butterflies, "fwightening" Mister Mole by jumping out and saying "Boo", swinging on cobwebs, and so forth. To his question "what do you think of that?", the narrator replies:

"It gives me sharp and shooting pains
   To listen to such drool."
I lifted up my foot and squashed
   The God damn little fool.

Alison Lurie calls the poem "a brilliant counterattack" against "a particularly cloying sort of supernatural whimsy" that was fashionable in the early 20th century.[112]

Taking up the poet R. C. Trevelyan's challenge (in Thamyris, or Is There a Future for Poetry?) to write on a modern subject "and dispute Virgil's supremacy in this field", Bishop produced "Gas and Hot Air".[lower-roman 15] It describes the operation of a car engine; "Vacuum pulls me; and I come! I come!" cries the gasoline, which reaches

[T]he secret bridal chamber where
   The earth-born gas first comes to kiss its bride,
The heaven-born and yet inviolate air
   Which is, on this year's models, purified.

"Ozymandias Revisited",[lower-roman 16] also widely anthologized,[113] reproduces the first two stanzas of Shelley's poem verbatim, but closes:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Also the names of Emory P. Gray,
Mr. and Mrs. Dukes, and Oscar Baer
Of 17 West 4th St., Oyster Bay.

Bishop's 1950 poem "Song of the Pop-Bottlers",[lower-roman 17] again widely anthologized,[114] starts:

Pop bottles pop-bottles
In pop shops;
The pop-bottles Pop bottles
Poor Pop drops.

It is described as among "poems to be said as fast as possible".[115]

One stanza of Bishop's "We Have Been Here Before"[lower-roman 18] reads

I had the same sense of persistence
On the site of the seat of the Sioux;
I heard in the teepee the sound of a sleepy
Pleistocene grunt. It was you.

The poet Louis Untermeyer described the poem as "a fine burlesque of a hundred stereotyped nostalgias".[116]

In his introduction to What Cheer, his own 1945 compendium of "American and British humorous and witty verse", the poet David McCord listed a dozen personal favorites; "We Have Been Here Before" was one.[117] Decades later, McCord praised Bishop's "technical skill" and "perfect ear" as displayed in this poem with those of Thomas Love Peacock as displayed in "The War Song of Dinas Vawr".[109]^: 10

Bishop's verse was collected in three volumes during his lifetime: Paramount Poems, Spilt Milk and A Bowl of Bishop. A newspaper review of Paramount Poems (1929, its title page reading " 'If it isn't a PARAMOUNT, it isn't a poem.' — Morris Bishop") found it entertaining:

[Bishop's] ear and his taste are vigorous, rough, unsubtle. But he makes up as an entertainer for what he lacks as a poet. . . . He's the protagonist of an audible smile in every poem—preferably in the last line. . . . He's as fresh and wholesome as a crisp fall apple, and—thank God!—the blemish of whimsicality is not upon him.[118]

Stanley Edgar Hyman regarded Bishop's verse in his second collection, Spilt Milk (1942), together with Richard Armour's in Yours for the Asking, as typical of New Yorker light verse: "stock light-verse subjects" adding up to a dated "Light Verse Attitude", all making "an impression of flawless technical competence combined with a fine dose of boredom after reading more than a few poems at a sitting".[119][lower-roman 19]

Like Hyman, Thomas Sugrue found the subject matter of some of the poems dated. Rather than Bishop's dexterity with classical forms, Sugrue particularly appreciated both the results when Bishop "goes back to his country-boy days", and also his "Rabelaisian wit".[120][lower-roman 20] Louis Untermeyer took a more favorable view of Spilt Milk. While conceding that "Mr. Bishop is not an originator", he wrote that "he equals and frequently surpasses such contemporary experts in deceptive casualness as F.P.A., Arthur Guiterman, Norman Levy, Phyllis McGinley, and David McCord . . . one seldom encounters a book with so many examples of barbed humor, experienced (not innocent) merriment, and critical nonsense."[121]

Bishop's third verse collection, A Bowl of Bishop: Museum Thoughts and Other Verses (1954) starts with a recipe for a bowlful (for six). There are 18 "Museum Thoughts", each commenting on a work of art (reproduced on the same page). A review in the Buffalo Courier-Express said that in addition to these, the book includes "some 70 other gems of purest, if hardly serene, light verse".[122] The review of the book in The New York Times quoted Bishop on the aim of light verse (see above), and commented: "at that kind of understood misunderstanding, Mr. Bishop is one of the pre-eminentest".[123]

On receiving advance notice from the Dial Press about publication of the book, Harvey Breit, a regular reviewer for The New York Times, was most impressed by "A Critical Appreciation of Morris Bishop" written (tongue in cheek, by Bishop himself) for the book, and wondered: "Is this the jacket copy to end all (non-factual) jacket copy?"[124]

The Best of Bishop, a posthumous (1980) anthology compiled by Charlotte Putnam Reppert, received a short and dismissive review in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the anonymous reviewer saying that Ogden Nash's poetry was "kinder" than Bishop's, James Thurber's was "droller", and "that of both—better".[125] A much more favorable review by the poet John Ciardi started by remarking on Bishop's adeptness in "The Naughty Preposition"[lower-roman 21] (also anthologized[126]). Bishop, he wrote:

is without redeeming social significance, unless one is willing to count precision of language and wit as a grace of civil exchange. Bishop is a master of the tongue.[127]

In Ernest Gowers' style guide The Complete Plain Words (1954), Bishop's poem "The Naughty Preposition" was awarded "championship of the sport of preposition-piling".[128] Like other writers,[129] the linguist D. Gary Miller points out that the poem was "written in response to the nonsensical dictum against ending a sentence with a preposition"; but he adds that the degree of preposition-piling (seven consecutive prepositions) in its last line exemplifies "the creativity that makes art out of the ordinary".[130]

David McCord praised "The Naughty Preposition" as "tops" of poems exhibiting a particular skill of Bishop's: "a couple of seamless quatrains producing the effect of nonsense simply by an unexpected grouping of ordinary words, or by the threading of a string of them like beads in some unusual way".[109]^: 11–12

His obituary in The New York Times called Bishop an "authority" on limericks, and a very facile composer of them;[6] Richard Armour wrote that he was "the only writer of light verse who has had any marked success with them in recent years".[131] He wrote them prolifically: 29 appear in Spilt Milk, 28 in The Best of Bishop, and several even in his pseudonymous novel The Widening Stain (see below). The literary scholar William S. Baring-Gould wrote that Bishop was "one of the great masters of the contemporary limerick".[132] Louis Untermeyer wrote that Bishop "has achieved the almost impossible: he has composed dozens of limericks that are decent but, nevertheless, funny".[121] Similarly, the cultural critic Gershon Legman called him "the unquestionable modern master in the clean limerick line"[133]^: xi (and also praised him for "one of the most penetrating articles written 'On the Limerick'"[133]^: liii[lower-roman 22]).

Bishop had a mystery novel, The Widening Stain, published in 1942 under the pseudonym W. Bolingbroke Johnson, rather jokily[lower-roman 23] described on the jacket as a former librarian for the American Dairy Goat Association and Okmulgee Agricultural and Mechanical Institute. The novel has been described as "[deriving] both its suspense and its humor . . . from its grotesque mixture of the oil of sex with the water of academic life".[134] Bishop put it together quickly, and when halfway done wrote that "The mystery itself would not deceive an intelligent chimpanzee, but I think I can make it more obscure on second writing."[135] Much of it is set in a university library that, according to his daughter Alison Jolly, borrowed from those of Yale and Cornell.[135] Its sleuth is Gilda Gorham, Chief Cataloger of the library; who according to Bishop's granddaughter Margaretta Jolly appears to be based on his wife.[136]

The review in The New York Times concluded, "We do not know who W. Bolingbroke Johnson is, but he writes a good story with an academic atmosphere that is not so highly rarefied as we have been led to believe it should be in university circles."[137] A review in The Spectator described the book, and Percival Wilde's novel Tinsley's Bones, as "good American detective stories, and as bright and cheerful as it is possible to be about murder"; however, "there is just something missing [from The Widening Stain] that places the story below the first class".[138] Ralph Partridge congratulated the new novelist for devising a new murder motive, but found the novel uneven and amateurish.[139]

The novel was very quickly attributed to Bishop,[lower-roman 24] who expressed some regret about it, inscribing a copy within Cornell's library:

A cabin in northern Wisconsin
Is what I would be for the nonce in,
To be rid of the pain
Of The Widening Stain
And W. Bolingbroke Johnson.[3][135]

Bishop started a second mystery but did not complete it.[8]

An enthusiastic review in The New York Times of A Gallery of Eccentrics (1928)[lower-roman 25] summarized by saying that "the author's fastidious sympathy invests [the twelve] with ironic but kindly humanity".[140]

A warm review by Romeyn Berry described the book as revealing "the lives and vivacities of a dozen piquant individuals", all of whom were outclassed by the narrator, himself an invention of Bishop's, an "erudite, irascible don". The review concludes:

Here's a book which, if you break it in tenderly and use it judiciously, will color in your hands like a good pipe and give you solace through many a long night. It's a volume, too, to present to any friend who has a nice discrimination in such matters as tobacco, jade, sound wines, lyric poetry, handsome women, and comfortable books.[141]

The Exotics (1969) profiled 21 more people[lower-roman 26] who were unusual in some way.[142][143] The review in The Boston Sunday Globe said that Bishop "has chosen a magnificent selection of kooks, eccentrics, hard-luck geniuses, or simply romantic figures, . . . and recounted vividly their zany careers";[144] that in The Indianapolis News said that "It may be that a few of the exotics are merely eccentrics, included to pad out the book, but the over-all effect is informative and pleasing."[145]

The Kirkus review of The Exotics described it as "A pride of little lions—many of them from Revolutionary times—in amiable when not admiring profiles which run about ten pages. . . . Mr. Bishop's style is elderly . . . and given to moralistic ruminations. . . ."[146]

In 1942 Bishop published the anthology A Treasury of British Humor. A review of this in Queen's Quarterly questioned some of the selections but observed that:

Here we have an American who not only appreciates British humour, but has a subtle appreciation of it, so subtle an appreciation that we are almost afraid that neither he nor his subtlety will be fully appreciated by less subtle readers. But that will be their fault, not his.[147]

Orville Prescott was also surprised by the selection, "only [registering] pained astonishment" when Bishop finds certain works funny. But despite certain regrets, he concluded that "This is a good book, a fat and rich and crisp and juicy book".[148]

Bishop's youthful experiments included a play produced in 1914 that he later wrote "was the worst play I have ever seen on the stage, and was possibly the worst play ever seen on any stage".[149]

Bishop's autobiography was edited by his daughter Alison Jolly as I Think I Have Been Here Before; it "includes poems and the text of many letters written by Bishop, as well as a few illustrations and photographs of Bishop and family".[150][151] As of 2023, it remains unpublished.

Bishop headed the Usage Panel of the first edition (1969) of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.[152] According to one estimate, among the 105 people making up the Usage Panel, Bishop was, together with Calvert Watkins, Mario Pei, and perhaps Morton W. Bloomfield, one of just three or four people "who may be described as linguistic specialists".[153] The panel was elderly (average age 64), and predominantly white, male and middle class. One unimpressed scholar wrote that he "would label Bishop's attitude toward the language aristocratic; 'the instinctive verbalizers of the unlettered mass' must be painful for him both linguistically and socially".[154]

Bishop was a Cornell University faculty trustee from 1957 to 1961.[155]

Toward the end of his life Bishop worked as the curator of the Olin Library's Fiske Petrarch Collection.[4] Reviewing the catalogue of this collection, the Hispanist Joseph G. Fucilla was disappointed that the library had only half-heartedly been acquiring newer publications with which to update the collection that Willard Fiske had started so grandly.[156]