Elizabeth Bishop

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Elizabeth Bishop

(born Feb. 8, 1911, Worcester, Mass., U.S. — died Oct. 6, 1979, Boston, Mass.) U.S. poet. Bishop was reared by relatives in Nova Scotia, Can., after her father died and her mother was institutionalized. In the 1950s and '60s she lived principally in Brazil with the Brazilian woman she loved. Her first book of poems (1946) contrasts her New England origins and her love of hot climates; reprinted with additions as North & South: A Cold Spring (1955), it received the Pulitzer Prize. Her works are celebrated for their formal brilliance and their close observations of everyday reality. They have elicited much admiration from other poets. Posthumous publications include The Collected Prose (1984) and One Art (1994), a collection of her letters.

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Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was a poet whose vivid sense of geography won her many honors.

Elizabeth Bishop barely knew her parents. Her father died of Bright's disease eight months after she was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, February 8, 1911. Her mother, Gertrude, never got over the death of her husband William and suffered a nervous collapse, eventually going insane. She was removed to a sanatorium when her young daughter was five.

One of her earliest and most vivid memories of her mother was of a ride in a swan boat in the Boston Public Garden. Bishop was dressed in black, as had been her wont since her husband's death. "One of the live swans paddling around us bit my mother's finger when she offered it a peanut," Bishop wrote. "I remember the hole in the black glove and a drop of blood on it." Thus was the beginning of a lifelong habit of observing minute, yet significant, details.

Most of her early years were spent with relatives, whom Bishop later described as taking care of her because they felt sorry for her. She did not stay in one place too long, not always by choice. Her sudden removal from her carefree childhood home with her maternal grandparents in the coastal town of Great Village, Nova Scotia, was a traumatic experience. She loved Canada and was unhappy at the wealthy Bishop residence in Worcester, where her father had been born. She wrote in "The Country Mouse," which was published posthumously:

I had been brought back unconsulted and against my wishes … to be saved from a life of poverty and provincialism, bare feet, suet puddings, unsanitary school slates, perhaps even from the inverted r's of my mother's family. With this surprising extra set of grandparents, until a few weeks ago no more than names, a new life was about to begin.

In "The Country Mouse," a humorous account of the nine months spent as a reluctant guest at the home of Sarah and John Wilson Bishop, a successful contractor who had erected buildings at Harvard and Princeton, Bishop presents some of the scenes which found their way into her poems. One of the most poignant was the waiting room of a dentist office to which she had accompanied her Aunt Jenny (Consuelo in the poem). Although she was not yet seven, she was able to read and was browsing through the pages of a 1918 National Geographic while her aunt was being ministered to.

"Suddenly, from inside, came an oh of pain - Aunt Consuelo's voice - "

This did not surprise her, because she thought of her aunt as "a foolish, timid woman." What caught her off guard was the realization that she was her "foolish aunt … falling, falling … into cold, blue-black space."

"…I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them."

It was the first time she had ever referred to herself in her poetry.

Bishop was more the observer with a vivid sense of place. She visited the Nova Scotia of her childhood, spent two years in Europe shortly after she graduated from Vassar, and travelled to North Africa, Mexico, Key West, and Brazil. She had stopped off in Rio de Janeiro en route to sailing the Strait of Magellan, but suffered a violent reaction after eating a cashew fruit. When she recovered she stayed on in Brazil for 15 years.

Bishop wrote sparingly, publishing only five slim volumes of poetry in 35 years, but what she wrote received high acclaim. In 1945 her work was selected from among over 800 entries in the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Competition, and the 30 poems submitted were published the following year as North & South. This collection, together with her second volume, A Cold Spring, earned her the Pulitizer Prize for 1956. She received the National Book Award for The Complete Poems in 1970, was the first American to receive the Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature - she was chosen by an international jury of writers - and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Geography III, her last book of poems, in 1977.

As one can tell from her titles, her lifelong passion for travelling influenced her poetry. "I think geography comes first in my work," she told an interviewer, "and then animals. But I like people, too. I've written a few poems about people."

Appropriately, one of her earliest poems, "The Map," describes "Labrador's yellow, where the moony Eskimo has oiled it" and points out that because of cramped space the names of seashore towns run out to the sea and cities cross neighboring mountains. Yet maps are not merely guides to geographical places, nor are they aesthetic objects only. As with most of her poems, "The Map" one sees is not just the colors of the rainbow confined to irregular shapes. One sees Bishop's poem as a guide to the way she views and senses the patterns of life.

"Man-Moth," inspired by a typographical error in the New York Times - the intended word was mammoth - describes the nocturnal New Yorker whose home is "the pale subways of cement" where

Each night he must be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams. Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie his rushing brain…. He has to keep his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.

The fantasy of the man-moth travelling through New York's underground and, when occasionally emerging to the street, seeing the moon "as a small hole at the top of the sky" has a Kafkaesque quality. When asked to contribute her favorite poem to an anthology called Poet's Choice, Bishop submitted "Man-Moth," commenting on the misprint that gave her the idea: "An oracle spoke from the page of the New York Times, kindly explaining New York City to me, at least for the moment."

Other of her poems that have been highly praised included "The Burglar of Babylon," a ballad set in Rio; "A Miracle for Breakfast," about hunger; "Jeronimo's House," one of her Key West poems; "The Moose," about a bus trip; and "The Fish," her most popular poem.

So frequently has this poem been anthologized that shortly before her death Bishop declared that she would rather have any of her poems but "The Fish" included in a collection, and, if publishers insisted, she asked that they print three of her other poems with it. In the poem the fish, wearing five old pieces of broken lines "like medals," gets a reprieve and is returned to the sea.

One of the reasons for the popularity of this poem was the strong praise it received from Randall Jarrell. Bishop, who was uncommitted to any school of poetry, was also admired by poets as disparate as John Ashbery, Octavio Paz, Robert Lowell, and Marianne Moore. She also knew Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, Pablo Neruda, and Carlos Drummond, one of Brazil's most popular poets, whose work she translated from the Portuguese.

But it was Marianne Moore who had the greatest influence of all of these. While still at Vassar, Bishop met Moore through the college librarian, Fanny Borden, niece of the accused ax-murderer Lizzie Borden. After an initial interview in the New York Public Library, the two poets began a long friendship, launched when Bishop helped Moore pilfer a few hairs from a baby elephant at a circus to replace strands of the rare hair on her bracelet. Bishop kept the adult elephants and the guard busy while Moore snipped away.

Moore helped to convince Bishop to abandon her plans to study medicine and to work at her poetry instead. Critics have said that the two poets shared the same gift of acute observation and understated wit. And each of them was fond of animals. Besides Moore, Bishop credited George Herbert and Wallace Stevens as being important influences on her.

Bishop died suddenly of a ruptured cerebral aneurism in her Boston apartment on October 6, 1979. She was 68 years old.

Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar
Born	February 8, 1911(1911-02-08) Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
Died	October 6, 1979 (aged 68) Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	United States
Literary movement	Modernism
Domestic partner(s)	Lota de Macedo Soares (1952-1967) Alice Methfessel (1971-1979)

Biography

Early years

Elementary School in Great Village, Nova Scotia, where Bishop first attended school.

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. After her father, a successful builder, died when she was eight months old, Bishop’s mother became mentally ill and was institutionalized in 1916. Bishop would later write about the time of her mother's struggles in her short story "In The Village." Effectively orphaned, during her very early childhood, she lived with her grandparents on a farm in Nova Scotia, a period she would later reference in her writing. Bishop's mother remained in an asylum until her death in 1934, and the two were never reunited.^[1]

Later in childhood, Bishop's paternal family gained custody and she was removed from the care of her grandparents and moved in with her father's much wealthier family in Worcester, Massachusetts. However, Bishop was very unhappy in Worcester and her separation from her grandparents made her very lonely. It's also significant to note that while she was living in Worcester, she developed chronic asthma which she would suffer from for the rest of her life. This time in her life is briefly chronicled in her poem "In The Waiting Room."

Bishop boarded at the Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts (where her first poems were published by her friend Frani Blough in a student magazine).^[2] Then she entered Vassar College in the fall of 1929, shortly before the stock market crash. In 1933, she co-founded Con Spirito, a rebel literary magazine at Vassar, with writer Mary McCarthy (one year her senior), Margaret Miller, and the sisters Eunice and Eleanor Clark.^[3]

Influences

Bishop was greatly influenced by the poet Marianne Moore^[4] to whom she was introduced by a librarian at Vassar in 1934. Moore took a keen interest in Bishop’s work, and at one point Moore dissuaded Bishop from attending Cornell Medical School, in which the poet had briefly enrolled herself after moving to New York City following her Vassar graduation. It was four years before Bishop addressed ‘Dear Miss Moore’ as ‘Dear Marianne,’ and only then at the elder poet’s invitation. The friendship between the two women, memorialized by an extensive correspondence (see One Art), endured until Moore's death in 1972. Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" (1955) contains allusions on several levels to Moore's 1924 poem "A Grave." ^[5]

She was introduced to Robert Lowell by Randall Jarrell in 1947 and they would become great friends, mostly through their written correspondence, until Lowell's death in 1977. After his death, she wrote, "our friendship, [which was] often kept alive through years of separation only by letters, remained constant and affectionate, and I shall always be deeply grateful for it"^[6]. They also both influenced each other's poetry. Lowell cited Bishop's influence on his poem "Skunk Hour" which he said, "[was] modeled on Miss Bishop's 'The Armadillo.'"^[7] Also, his poem "The Scream" is "derived from...Bishop's story In the Village."^[8] "North Haven," one of the last poems she published during her lifetime, was written in memory of Lowell in 1978.

Travels and awards

Bishop was independently wealthy in early adulthood as a result of an inheritance from her deceased father that didn't run out until the end of her life. With this inheritance, Bishop was able to travel widely without worrying about employment and lived in many cities and countries which are described in her poems.^[9] She lived in France for several years in the mid-1930s with a friend she knew at Vassar, Louise Crane, who was a paper-manufacturing heiress. In 1938 Bishop purchased a house with Crane at 624 White Street in Key West, Florida. While living there Bishop made the acquaintance of Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, who had divorced Ernest in 1940.

In 1946, Marianne Moore suggested Bishop for the Houghton Mifflin Prize for poetry, which Bishop won. Her first book, North & South, was published in 1,000 copies. The book prompted the literary critic Randall Jarrell to write that “all her poems have written underneath, 'I have seen it,'" referring to Bishop's talent for vivid description.^[10]

Upon receiving a substantial (at the time) $2,500 traveling fellowship from Bryn Mawr College in 1951, Bishop set off to circumnavigate South America by boat. Arriving in Santos, Brazil in November of that year, Bishop expected to stay two weeks—but stayed fifteen years.

While living in Brazil, in 1956 Bishop received the Pulitzer Prize for a collection of poetry, Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring, which combined her first two books. ^[11] It was also during her time in Brazil that Elizabeth Bishop became greatly interested in the languages and literatures of Latin America.^{[citation needed]} She translated into English and was influenced by South and Central American poets, including the Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, as well as the Brazilian poets João Cabral de Melo Neto and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, of whom she said, "I didn't know him at all. He's supposed to be very shy. I'm supposed to be very shy. We've met once — on the sidewalk at night. We had just come out of the same restaurant, and he kissed my hand politely when we were introduced."^[12]

In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize, Bishop also won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as two Guggenheim fellowships and an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. In 1976, she became the first woman to receive the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and remains the only American to be awarded that prize.^[13]

Bishop lectured in higher education for a number of years starting in the 1970s when her inheritance began to run out^[14]. For a short time she taught at the University of Washington, before teaching at Harvard University for seven years. She also taught at New York University, before finishing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She often spent her summers in her summer house in the island community of North Haven, Maine.

In 1977 Bishop published her last book, Geography III, and two years later, she died of a cerebral aneurysm in her apartment at Lewis Wharf, Boston. She is buried in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Personal life

Although Elizabeth Bishop was involved in romantic relationships with women, she did not write about her personal life or her sexual orientation in her poetry and did not see herself as a "lesbian poet" or as a "female poet." She only wanted to be judged based on the quality of her writing and not on her gender or sexual orientation. ^[15]

Whereas many of her contemporaries like Robert Lowell and John Berryman made the intimate details of their personal lives an important part of their poetry, Bishop avoided this practice altogether. And Bishop's style of writing is particularly known for its objective, distant point of view.

Bishop had two long-term relationships with women. The first was with Brazilian socialite and architect Lota de Macedo Soares.^[16] Soares was descended from a prominent and notable political family; the two lived as a couple for fifteen years. Although Bishop was not forthcoming about details, much of their relationship was documented in Bishop's extensive correspondence with Samuel Ashley Brown. However, in its later years, the relationship deteriorated, becoming volatile and tempestuous, marked by bouts of depression, tantrums and alcoholism.^[17] Bishop had an affair with another woman and ultimately left Lota and returned to the United States. Soares, suffering from depression, followed Bishop to America and committed suicide in 1967.^[18]

The second was with Alice Methfessel, whom Bishop met in 1971, beginning a relationship with her. Methfessel became Bishop's partner and, after her death, her literary executor.^[19]

Bibliography

Poetry

North & South (Houghton Mifflin, 1946)
Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1955)
A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1956)
Questions of Travel (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965)
The Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969)
Geography III, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976)
The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983)
Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, edited and annotated by Alice Quinn, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006)^[20]

Other works

The Diary of "Helena Morley," by Alice Brant, translated and with an Introduction by Elizabeth Bishop, (Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957)
"Three Stories by Clarice Lispector," Kenyon Review 26 (Summer 1964): 500-511.
The Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968)
An Anthology of Twentieth Century Brazilian Poetry edited by Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil, (Wesleyan University Press (1972)
The Collected Prose (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984)
One Art: Letters, selected and edited by Robert Giroux, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994)
Exchanging Hats: Paintings, edited and with an Introduction by William Benton, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996)
Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares, by Carmen L. Oliveira; translated by Neil K. Besner, (Rutgers University Press, 2002)^[16]
Poems, Prose and Letters Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, eds. (New York: Library of America, 2008) ISBN 978-1-59853-017-9
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano, with Saskia Hamilton (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008) ISBN 978-0374185435
- Reviewed by Dan Chiasson, "Works on Paper: the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell" The New Yorker 84/35 (3 November 2008) : 106-110

Awards and honors

1945: Houghton Mifflin Poetry Prize Fellowship
1947: Guggenheim Fellowship
1949: Appointed Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress
1950: American Academy of Arts and Letters Award
1951: Lucy Martin Donelly Fellowship (awarded by Bryn Mawr College)
1953: Shelley Memorial Award
1954: Elected to lifetime membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters
1956: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
1960: Chapelbrook Foundation Award
1964: Academy of American Poets Fellowship
1968: Ingram-Merrill Foundation Grant
1969: National Book Award
1969: The Order of the Rio Branco (awarded by the Brazilian government)
1974: Harriet Monroe Poetry Award
1976: Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize
1976: Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
1977: National Book Critics Circle Award
1978: Guggenheim Fellowship

References

^ "Elizabeth Bishop". Worcester Area Writers. Worcester Polytechnic Institute. http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/Library/Archives/WAuthors/bishop/bio.html. Retrieved 2008-04-25.
^ "Elizabeth Bishop Prize Winners". The Blue Pencil. Walnut Hill School. http://www.walnuthillarts.org/creative_writing/elizabeth_bishop.html. Retrieved 2008-04-25.
^ "Elizabeth Bishop, American Poet". Elizabeth Bishop Society. Vassar College. http://projects.vassar.edu/bishop/. Retrieved 2008-04-25.
^ Kalstone, David. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. University of Michigan Press (2001): 4. In an early letter to Moore, Bishop wrote: "[W]hen I began to read your poetry at college I think it immediately opened up my eyes to the possibility of the subject-matter I could use and might never have thought of using if it hadn't been for you. — (I might not have written any poems at all, I suppose.) I think my approach is so much vaguer and less defined and certainly more old-fashioned — sometimes I'm amazed at people's comparing me to you when all I'm doing is some kind of blank verse — can't they see how different it is? But they can't apparently."
^ Stewart, Susan. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2002): 141, 357 fn.78 and fn.79).
^ Bishop, Elizabeth. Poems, Prose, and Letters. New York: Library of America, 2008. 733.
^ Lowell, Robert. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003. 1046.
^ Lowell, Robert. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003. 326.
^ www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/7
^ Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age University Press of Florida, 2001, p. 181
^ [1]
^ Ploughshares, the literary journal
^ http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/neustadt/laureates.html
^ Schwartz, Tony. "Elizabeth Bishop Won A Pulitzer for Poetry and Taught At Harvard." New York Times 8 October 1979: B13.
^ Kalstone, David and Robert Hemenway. Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
^ ^a ^b The Love of Her Life by Emily Nussbaum, a June 2002 review in The New York Times of Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares
^ "http://projects.vassar.edu/bishop/
^ Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares,, Oliveira, Carmen, Rutgers University Press, ISBN 0-813-53359-7, 2002
^ Bold Type: Essay on Elizabeth Bishop
^ Like a Jeweled Box Waiting at the Bottom of the Sea: Quinn Offers a New View of Elizabeth Bishop, a review of Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke Box in Moondance magazine June-Sept. 2006

Bibliography

Costello, Bonnie (1991). Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674246896.
Kalstone, David (1989). Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. ISBN 0374109605.
Millier, Brett (1993). Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520079787.
Bishop, Elizabeth (1996). Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 0878058710.
Travisano, Thomas (1988). Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ISBN 0813911591.

External links

Yale College Lecture on Elizabeth Bishop audio, video and full transcripts from Open Yale Courses
Links to Selected Elizabeth Bishop Poems
The Elizabeth Bishop Papers at Washington University in St. Louis

Persondata
NAME	Bishop, Elizabeth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Poet Laureate of the United States, 1949 - 1950
DATE OF BIRTH	8 February 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH	Worcester, Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH	6 October 1979
PLACE OF DEATH	Boston, Massachusetts

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1946	North and South. Chosen from among 843 manuscripts for the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Award in 1945, Bishop's debut volume displays a distinctive and powerful new poetic voice of intense feeling and accurate observation. While a student at Vassar College, Bishop met Marianne Moore, who became her mentor and wrote an introduction to Bishop's first published poems in the anthology Trial Balances (1935).
1955	Poems: North & South--A Cold Spring. Bishop's second collection combines her first with nineteen new poems, including important works such as "The Fish," "At the Fishhouses," "Cape Breton," and "The Prodigal," her only poem dealing with alcoholism. The volume is awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
1965	Questions of Travel. Having moved to Brazil in 1951, where she would reside until 1973, Bishop explores the move and her growing understanding of Brazilian culture in this collection, which also includes reflections on the Nova Scotia of her childhood and a prose poem memoir, "In the Village." Bishop's Complete Poems would appear in 1969, winning the National Book Award.
1976	Geography III. Bishop's final collection contains some of her greatest works, including "In the Waiting Room," "The Moose," and "Crusoe in England." The volume wins the National Book Critics Circle Award.
1994	One Art: Letters. Beginning with correspondence the poet wrote while still an undergraduate at Vassar and ending with a letter written the day she died, this collection constitutes a kind of autobiography, filled with personal revelations and insights into Bishop's work.

Elizabeth Bishop

Contents

Biography

Early years

Influences

Travels and awards

Personal life

Bibliography

Awards and honors

References

Bibliography

External links