Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop

1911-02-08 Worcester, Massachusetts, EUA
1979-10-06 Boston, Massachusetts, EUA
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Some Poems

Arrival At Santos

Arrival At Santos

Here is a coast; here is a harbor;
here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery:
impractically shaped and--who knows?--self-pitying mountains,
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,


with a little church on top of one. And warehouses,
some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue,
and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is going to answer you


and your immodest demands for a different world,
and a better life, and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,
after eighteen days of suspension?


Finish your breakfast. The tender is coming,
a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brilliant rag.
So that's the flag. I never saw it before.
I somehow never thought of there being a flag,


but of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume,
and paper money; they remain to be seen.
And gingerly now we climb down the ladder backward,
myself and a fellow passenger named Miss Breen,


descending into the midst of twenty-six freighters
waiting to be loaded with green coffee beaus.
Please, boy, do be more careful with that boat hook!
Watch out! Oh! It has caught Miss Breen's


skirt! There! Miss Breen is about seventy,
a retired police lieutenant, six feet tall,
with beautiful bright blue eyes and a kind expression.
Her home, when she is at home, is in Glens Fall


s, New York. There. We are settled.
The customs officials will speak English, we hope,
and leave us our bourbon and cigarettes.
Ports are necessities, like postage stamps, or soap,


but they seldom seem to care what impression they make,
or, like this, only attempt, since it does not matter,
the unassertive colors of soap, or postage stamps-wasting
away like the former, slipping the way the latter


do when we mail the letters we wrote on the boat,
either because the glue here is very inferior
or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once;
we are driving to the interior.

Cape Breton

Cape Breton

Out on the high "bird islands," Ciboux and Hertford,
the razorbill auks and the silly-looking puffins all stand
with their backs to the mainland
in solemn, uneven lines along the cliff's brown grass-frayed edge,
while the few sheep pastured there go "Baaa, baaa."
(Sometimes, frightened by aeroplanes, they stampede
and fall over into the sea or onto the rocks.)
The silken water is weaving and weaving,
disappearing under the mist equally in all directions,
lifted and penetrated now and then
by one shag's dripping serpent-neck,
and somewhere the mist incorporates the pulse,
rapid but unurgent, of a motor boat.


The same mist hangs in thin layers
among the valleys and gorges of the mainland
like rotting snow-ice sucked away
almost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift
among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack-dull,
dead, deep pea-cock colors,
each riser distinguished from the next
by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge,
alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view.


The wild road clambers along the brink of the coast.
On it stand occasional small yellow bulldozers,
but without their drivers, because today is Sunday.
The little white churches have been dropped into the matted hills
like lost quartz arrowheads.
The road appears to have been abandoned.
Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been abandoned,
unless the road is holding it back, in the interior,
where we cannot see,
where deep lakes are reputed to be,
and disused trails and mountains of rock
and miles of burnt forests, standing in gray scratches
like the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones-and
these regions now have little to say for themselves
except in thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upward
freely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing
in brown-wet, fine torn fish-nets.


A small bus comes along, in up-and-down rushes,


packed with people, even to its step.


(On weekdays with groceries, spare automobile parts, and pump parts,


but today only two preachers extra, one carrying his frock coat on a
hanger.)


It passes the closed roadside stand, the closed schoolhouse,


where today no flag is flying


from the rough-adzed pole topped with a white china doorknob.


It stops, and a man carrying a bay gets off,


climbs over a stile, and goes down through a small steep meadow,



which establishes its poverty in a snowfall of daisies,
to his invisible house beside the water.


The birds keep on singing, a calf bawls, the bus starts.
The thin mist follows
the white mutations of its dream;
an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks.
Elizabeth Bishop (8 February 1911 – 6 October 1979) Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956 and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. Elizabeth Bishop House is an artists' retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia dedicated to her memory. She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century. Early Years Elizabeth Bishop, an only child, 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 wrote 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 Great Village, Nova Scotia, a period she also referenced in her writing. This was also where she developed into a first-class fisherwoman. Bishop's mother remained in an asylum until her death in 1934, and the two were never reunited. 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 wealthier family in Worcester, Massachusetts. However, Bishop was unhappy in Worcester, and her separation from her grandparents made her lonely. While she was living in Worcester, she developed chronic asthma, from which she suffered for the rest of her life. Her time in Worcester is briefly chronicled in her poem "In The Waiting Room." Bishop boarded at the Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts, where she studied music. At the school her first poems were published by her friend Frani Blough in a student magazine. Then she entered Vassar College in the fall of 1929, shortly before the stock market crash, planning to be a composer. She gave up music because of a terror of performance and switched to English where she took courses including 16th and 17th century literature and the novel. Bishop published her work in her senior year in The Magazine (based in California) and 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. Bishop graduated in 1934. Influences Bishop was greatly influenced by the poet Marianne Moore 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." She was introduced to Robert Lowell by Randall Jarrell in 1947 and they became 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". 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.'" Also, his poem "The Scream" is "derived from...Bishop's story In the Village." "North Haven," one of the last poems she published during her lifetime, was written in memory of Lowell in 1978. Travel and Success Bishop had an independent income in early adulthood as a result of an inheritance from her deceased father that did not 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. 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 Hemingway in 1940. In 1949 to 1950, she was Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress, and lived at Bertha Looker's Boardinghouse, 1312 30th Street Northwest, Washington, D.C., in Georgetown. 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. Upon receiving a substantial $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. She lived in Pétropolis with architect Lota de Macedo Soares, descended from a prominent and notable political family. 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. Although Bishop was not forthcoming about details of her romance with Soares, 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. It was during her time in Brazil that Elizabeth Bishop became increasingly interested in the languages and literatures of Latin America. She 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 and translated their work into English. Regarding de Andrade, 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." After Soares took her own life in 1967 Bishop spent more time in the US. Literary Style and Identity Bishop did not see herself as a "lesbian poet" or as a "female poet." Although she still considered herself to be "a strong feminist," she only wanted to be judged based on the quality of her writing and not on her gender or sexual orientation. Also, where some of her notable contemporaries like Robert Lowell and John Berryman made the intimate, often sordid details of their personal lives an important part of their poetry, Bishop avoided this practice altogether. For instance, like Berryman, Bishop struggled with alcoholism and depression throughout her adult life; but Bishop never wrote about this struggle (whereas Berryman made his alcoholism and depression a focal point in his dream song poems). In contrast to this confessional style involving large amounts of self-exposure, Bishop's style of writing, though it sometimes involved sparse details from her personal life, was known for its highly detailed and objective, distant point of view and for its reticence on the sordid subject matter that obsessed her contemporaries. In contrast to a poet like Lowell, when Bishop wrote about details and people from her own life (as she did in her story about her childhood and her mentally unstable mother in "In the Village"), she always used discretion. Although she was generally supportive of the "confessional" style of her friend, Robert Lowell, she drew the line at Lowell's highly controversial book The Dolphin (1973), in which he used and altered private letters from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick (whom he'd recently divorced after 23 years of marriage), as material for his poems. In a letter to Lowell, dated March 21, 1972, Bishop strongly urged him against publishing the book, writing, "One can use one's life as material [for poems]--one does anyway—but these letters—aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn't changed them. . .etc. But art just isn't worth that much." Later Career In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize, Bishop 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. Bishop lectured in higher education for a number of years starting in the 1970s when her inheritance began to run out. For a short time she taught at the University of Washington, before teaching at Harvard University for seven years. She often spent her summers in her summer house in the island community of North Haven, Maine. She taught at New York University, before finishing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She commented "I don’t think I believe in writing courses at all… It’s true, children sometimes write wonderful things, paint wonderful pictures, but I think they should be discouraged." In 1971 Bishop began a relationship with Alice Methfessel. Never a prolific writer, Bishop noted that she would begin many projects and leave them unfinished. She published her last book in 1976, Geography III. Three years later, she died of a cerebral aneurysm in her apartment at Lewis Wharf, Boston. She is buried in Hope Cemetery in Worcester, Massachusetts. Alice Methfessel was her literary executor. 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: Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 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 Works: Poetry Collections 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 by Elizabeth Bishop ed. Alice Quinn, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006) Other Works The Diary of Helena Morley, by Alice Brant, translated and with an Introduction by Elizabeth Bishop, (Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957) 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: Elizabeth Bishop Paintings, edited and with an Introduction by William Benton, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996) Poems, Prose and Letters Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, eds. (New York: Library of America, 2008) Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano, Saskia Hamilton (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008) Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop. George Monteiro Ed. (University Press of Mississippi 1996)
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Elizabeth Bishop documentary
24. Elizabeth Bishop
ORAL HISTORY INITIATIVE: On Elizabeth Bishop || Woodberry Poetry Room
Introduction to Elizabeth Bishop: her life and poetic style
Elizabeth Bishop: Selected Poems | 92Y Readings
Colm Tóibín on Elizabeth Bishop and Thom Gunn
25. Elizabeth Bishop (cont.)
Taking Elizabeth Bishop's Harvard Poetry Class - (from "Studying With Miss Bishop")
Memorial of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, Religious -1.4.2024
The Poem 'One Art,' by Elizabeth Bishop
Miranda Otto portrays poet Elizabeth Bishop
The Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (Full Program) | 92Y Readings
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Losing | AmorSciendi
Literary Birthday Celebration: Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop: A Conversation about Her Poetry
Megan Marshall, "Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle For Breakfast"
Elizabeth Bishop at 100
Helena Bonham Carter reads 'Letter to NY' by Elizabeth Bishop for A Poem for Every Autumn Day
Hrishikesh Hirway reads "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop reading "The Fish."
Introducing Elizabeth Bishop
Sophia Wilcott: “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop
M. Mark reads and responds to "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
Leaving Cert English Poetry - 'The Fish' - Elizabeth Bishop
Merav Opher reads "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop (Favorite Poem Project)
Poet Henri Cole reads Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Shampoo"
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop recited by Miranda Otto
"One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop (read by Tom O'Bedlam)
Our God Is Tremendous- Sis Elizabeth Bishop & Choir, Third Exodus Assembly
“You Are An I”: On Elizabeth Bishop | Woodberry Poetry Room
"The Armadillo" by Elizabeth Bishop (read by Tom O'Bedlam)
Poetry: "Filling Station" by Elizabeth Bishop (read by Glenn Close)
"The Man Moth" by Elizabeth Bishop, read by Robert Pinsky
Election By Grace- Elizabeth Bishop & Choir, Third Exodus Assembly
In The Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop read by A Poetry Channel
THESE FINE MORNINGS: Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker || Woodberry Poetry Room
Casa colonial mineira da escritora Elizabeth Bishop, em Ouro Preto
The Greatest Love Story - Sis. Elizabeth Bishop & Choir, Third Exodus Assembly
Alexander Morin: “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop
Hylka Maria | A Arte de Perder | Elizabeth Bishop
Learning Recitation: Kareem Sayegh reads "The Man-Moth" by Elizabeth Bishop
John Murillo reads Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art"
Elizabeth Bishop reads her poem "Filling Station."
John Murillo - "Variation on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop"
Understanding "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
POR QUE DEVEMOS HOMENAGEAR ELIZABETH BISHOP? I VRATATA
Discussing 'The Prodigal' by Elizabeth Bishop
In the Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop Revision Video
Robert Pinsky reads Elizabeth Bishop's poem "At the Fishhouses"
One Art: Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil

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