Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979), was an American poet and writer, increasingly regarded as one of the finest 20th century poets writing in English. Bishop has always been regarded highly by critics and connoisseurs of poetry (James Merill referred to her charmingly as a "poet's poet's poet"), but only within recent decades has her stock risen among more general readers of verse. Bishop's most salient features as a poet are her tremendous dedication to the craft (her notebooks reveal that almost every poem she ever published had undergone twenty or more revisions) and her meticulous precision in her choice of just the right words and images to convey experiences both microscopic and hauntingly beautiful.

Life

Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. When she was very young her father died and her mother was sent to a mental institution, and Elizabeth Bishop was sent to live with her Canadian grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia for a few years, and later with her father's family in Boston, Massachusetts. These early years of dispossession would later come to factor prominently in her poetry.

Bishop attended The Walnut Hill School in Massachusetts and entered Vassar College in the fall of 1929, the year of the stock market crash. She graduated from college in 1934, having befriended writer Mary McCarthy, who was one year her senior. Bishop spent the next two years traveling abroad to France, Spain, North Africa, Ireland, and Italy and then settled in Key West, Florida, for four years. Bishop's early poetry, such as the Florida poems in North & South, would deal explicitly with her experiences of travel and the contrast of an adult life spent in warm climates versus a childhood spent in small, cold villages on the Atlantic coast.

During this time, Bishop befriended the poets Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, and, later, James Merill. Moore, in particular, who was many years Bishop's senior, would act as a mentor and stabilizing force in Bishop's life. The two corresponded constantly until Moore's death in 1972. Like Moore, Bishop's poetry focused on almost microscopic impressions of scenes from the world which reveal, upon close examination, an entire world unto themselves. Lowell's influence on Bishop's life would almost be as great as Moore's; the two wrote letters to one another continuously and at one point Lowell even proposed to her, though Bishop declined. However, Lowell's confessional, heavily autobiographical style did not appeal to her, and their poetic styles have relatively little in common.

After returning home from her travels, Bishop published her first volume of poems, North & South, in 1946, and served in the position of consultant in poetry (now called poet laureate) for the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950. While working for the Library of Congress Bishop wrote and published one of her more famous poems, Visits to St. Elizabeth's, written in the style of a nursery rhyme and describing the disorienting experience of visiting the institutionalized poet, Ezra Pound. The poem begins as follows:

This is the house of Bedlam.

This is the man

that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is the time

of the tragic man

that lies in the house of Bedlam.

This is a wristwatch

telling the time

of the talkative man

that lies in the house of Bedlam.

During most of the 1950s and '60s she spent most of her time in Brazil with her companion Lota de Macedo Soares, living in the mountain city of Petropolis a few miles north of Rio de Janeiro. While living in Brazil she published an additional book of poems Questions of Travel dealing again with ones sense of place, with life lived in two hemispheres, and with the place of poetry in a changing world. She also edited an anthology of Brazilian poetry and translated Alica Brant's classic Brazilian novel, The Diaries of Helena Morley.

In the early 1970s Bishop left Brazil after Lota's suicide to live again in America. She was appointed to teach writing at Harvard from 1970 to 1977 and during this time she published her last volume of poems, Geography III, once again returning to the scenes of Nova Scotia and tropical Brazil that had shaped her life. Appointed to the Academy of American Poets in 1976, Elizabeth Bishop passed away in October of 1979 in Boston.

Work

Elizabeth Bishop was awarded the Houghton Mifflin poetry award in 1946 and, in 1956, the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of poetry, North & South - A Cold Spring. She later received the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as two Guggenheim fellowships. In 1976, she became the first woman to receive the International Neustadt Prize for Literature, and remains the only American to be awarded that prize.[1]

Bishop often contributed articles to The New Yorker, and, in 1964, wrote the obituary for Flannery O'Connor in The New York Review of Books.

Bishop lectured in higher education for a number of years. For a short time she taught at the University of Washington, before moving to Harvard for seven years. She also taught at New York University, before finishing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Early in her career, Bishop was regarded (and perhaps dismissed) as a "miniaturist," a master of small poetic structures and descriptive detail. Careful reading of her work, however, reveals a sharp-edged confessional edge: her life story is told through poems which, though nominally addressing and describing other subject matter (including paintings, tourist destinations, etc.), in fact speak to true events (and to her, and the reader's, underlying existential states).

She published very little work, more for her perfectionism than lack of offers. Despite her prominence in 20th century American poetry, her Complete Poems is a relatively slim volume.

Works

Poetry:

• North & South (1946)
• North & South—A Cold Spring (1955)
• Questions of Travel (1965)
• The Complete Poems (1969)
• Geography III (1976)
• The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (1983) [posthumous]

Individual poems:

• Visits to St. Elizabeth's (1950)

Other works:

• The Diary of Helena Morley (translation) (1957)
• Three Stories by Clarice Lispector (translation) (1964)
• Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon (children's book) (1968)
• One Art (collected letters) (1994) [posthumous]
• Exchanging Hats (paintings) (1996) [posthumous]

External links

• Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar College
• Elizabeth Bishop's poetry Excellent introduction, includes audio presentation
• See also connection to the poem Casabianca (poem) by Felicia Hemans which Elizabeth Bishop also wrote a version of, Casabianca (Elizabeth Bishop version).

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