Elizabeth Bishop
1911-02-08 Worcester, Massachusetts, EUA
1979-10-06 Boston, Massachusetts, EUA
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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)