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Elizabeth Bishop

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Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979), was an American poet and writer. She is regarded as one of the finest 20th century poets writing in English.

Contents

Early life

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts to William Thomas Bishop and Gertrude Bulmer Bishop. Her father died when she was an infant; in the wake of that event, her mother descended into mental illness and was institutionalized. Bishop then lived with her Canadian Bulmer grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia, a period she remembered fondly and would later idealize. She later lived with her father's family in Boston, Massachusetts.

Bishop attended Walnut Hill School, and entered Vassar College in the fall of 1929, the year of the stock market crash. In 1933 she co-founded Con Spirito, a rebel literary magazine at Vassar, with Mary McCarthy (one year her senior), Margaret Miller, and the sisters Eunice and Eleanor Clark. Bishop graduated in 1934 and moved initially to New York City. Bishop was greatly influenced by Marianne Moore, to whom she was introduced by the librarian at Vassar. The friendship, memorialized by an extensive correspondence, endured until Moore's death.

In 1938 Bishop purchased a house at 624 White Street in Key West, Florida that she shared with heiress Louise Crane. While living there she made the acquaintance of Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, who had divorced Ernest in 1940.

She was introduced to Robert Lowell by the Randall Jarrell in 1947. She wrote the poem Visits to St. Elizabeth's in 1950 as a recollection of visits to Ezra Pound when he was confined there. She met James Merrill in 1950, and became a close friend of the poet in later years.

Writing Career

In 1946, Marianne Moore suggested Bishop for the Houghton Mifflin Prize for poetry, which Bishop won. In 1956, not long after moving to Brazil, Bishop received 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 and an Ingram Merrill grant. 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.[link]

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

Bishop's corpus of published poetry is somewhat smaller than that of her contemporaries. However, this was the result of her perfectionism, rather than a lack of offers to print her work. Although her Complete Poems is a relatively slim volume, the quality of the poems and their continuing influence have far exceeded the book's length.

Works

Poetry:

Other works:

Prizes and Awards

References

External links

 

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