Bonnie Costello

Bonnie Costello teaches in the fields of modern and contemporary poetry, and has been especially interested in visual thinking and intersections between literature and visual arts. Her books on Marianne Moore (1981) and Elizabeth Bishop (1991) were among the first full critical studies of these poets and her edition of The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore opened up a new window into the history of modernism. Other poets she has often written about include: Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, John Ashbery, Charles Wright, A. R. Ammons.

In her recent books Bonnie has explored landscape and environmental poetry (Shifting Ground [2003]), and the interplay of private and public spheres in still life motifs (Planets on Tables[2008]).   In addition to academic books and articles, she has occasionally published literary essays on art, travel and memory, and dabbles in translation of Italian poetry. Besides teaching introductory courses and surveys in modern and contemporary poetry, she has offered seminars on a variety of subjects–theories of modern lyric, poetry and the environment, modern poetry and the visual arts, poets and their letters, modernist poetics and the social pressures of the 30s.