Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 â€" October 6, 1979) was an American poet and short-story writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976.

Life and career

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, Bishopâ€™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 Great Village, Nova Scotia, a period she also referred to in her writing. 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. 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 there, and her separation from her maternal 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." In 1918, her grandparents, realizing that Bishop was unhappy living with them, sent her to live with her mother's oldest sister, Maud Boomer Shepherdson, and her husband George. The Bishops paid Maud to house and educate their granddaughter. The Shepherdsons lived in a tenement in an impoverished Revere, Massachusetts neighborhood populated mostly by Irish and Italian immigrants. The family later moved to better circumstances in Cliftondale, Massachusetts. It was Bishop's aunt who introduced her to the works of Victorian poets, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Bishop was very ill as a child and, as a result, received very little formal schooling. She attended Saugus High School for her freshman year. She was accepted to the Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts for her sophomore year but was behind on her vaccinations and not allowed to attend. Instead she spent the year at the North Shore Country Day School in Swampscott, Massachusetts. Bishop then boarded at the Walnut Hill School, 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). 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. 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, where the poet had briefly enrolled herself after moving to New York City following her Vassar graduation. Regarding Moore's influence on Bishop's writing, Bishop's friend and Vassar peer, the writer Mary McCarthy stated, "Certainly between Bishop and Marianne Moore there are resemblances: the sort of close microscopic inspection of certain parts of experience. [However,] I think there is something a bit too demure about Marianne Moore, and there's nothing demure about Elizabeth Bishop." Moore helped Bishop first publish some of her poems in an anthology called Trial Balances in which established poets introduced the work of unknown, younger poets.

It was four years before Bishop addressed "Dear Miss Moore" as "Dear Marianne" and only then at the elder poetâ€™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 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.

Travels

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 wrote frequently about her love of travel in poems like "Questions of Travel" and "Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance." 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.

From 1949 to 1950, she was the Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress, and lived at Bertha Looker's Boardinghouse, 1312 30th Street Northwest, Washington, D.C., in Georgetown.

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 15 years. She lived in PetrÃ³polis with architect Lota de Macedo Soares, who was descended from a prominent and notable political family. 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, the relationship deteriorated in its later years, becoming volatile and tempestuous, marked by bouts of depression, tantrums and alcoholism.

During her time in Brazil 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 JoÃ£o 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 â€" 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 United States.

Publication history and awards

For a major American poet, Bishop published very sparingly. Her first book, North & South was first published in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Prize for poetry. This book included important poems like "The Man-Moth" (which describes a dark and lonely fictional creature inspired by what Bishop noted was "[a] newspaper misprint for 'mammoth'") and "The Fish" (in which Bishop describes a caught fish in exacting detail). But she didn't publish a follow up until nine years later. That volume, titled Poems: North and Southâ€"A Cold Spring, first published in 1955, included her first book, plus the 18 new poems that constituted the new "Cold Spring" section. Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize for this book in 1956.

Then there was another long wait before Bishop published her next volume, Questions of Travel, in 1965. This book showed the influence that living in Brazil had had on Bishop's writing. It included poems in the book's first section that were explicitly about life in Brazil including "Arrival at Santos," "Manuelzinho," and "The Riverman." But in the second section of the volume Bishop also included pieces set in other locations like "In the Village" and "First Death in Nova Scotia" which take place in her native country. Questions of Travel was her first book to include one of her short stories (the aforementioned "In the Village").

Bishop's next major publication was The Complete Poems (1969) which included eight new poems and won a National Book Award. Then she published the last new book of poems that she would publish in her lifetime, Geography III (1977) which included frequently anthologized poems like "In the Waiting Room" and "One Art." The book won Bishop the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She was the first woman to receive the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and remains the only American to have won that prize.

Bishop's The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 was published posthumously in 1983. Other posthumous publications included The Collected Prose (1984), which included her essays and short stories, and Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (2006) which courted some controversy upon publication. Meghan O'Rourke notes, in an article from Slate magazine, "It's no wonder ... that the recent publication of Bishop's hitherto uncollected poems, drafts, and fragments ... encountered fierce resistance, and some debate about the value of making this work available to the public. In an outraged piece for The New Republic, Helen Vendler labeled the drafts 'maimed and stunted' and rebuked Farrar, Straus and Giroux for choosing to publish the volume."

Literary style and identity

Bishop did not see herself as a "lesbian poet" or as a "female poet." In part, because Bishop refused to have her work published in all-female poetry anthologies, other female poets involved with the women's movement thought she was hostile to the movement. For instance, a student at Harvard who was close to Bishop in the 60s, Kathleen Spivack, wrote in her memoir, "I think Bishop internalized the misogyny of the time. How could she not? ... Bishop had a very ambivalent relation to being a woman plus poetâ€"plus lesbianâ€"in the Boston/Cambridge/Harvard nexus ... Extremely vulnerable, sensitive, she hid much of her private life. She wanted nothing to do with anything that seemed to involve the women's movement. She internalized many of the male attitudes of the day toward women, who were supposed to be attractive, appealing to men, and not ask for equal pay or a job with benefits." However, this was not how Bishop necessarily viewed herself. In an interview with The Paris Review from 1978, she said that, despite her insistence on being excluded from female poetry anthologies, she still considered herself to be "a strong feminist" but that she only wanted to be judged based on the quality of her writing and not on her gender or sexual orientation.

Where some of her notable 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. 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 personal subject matter that the work of her contemporaries involved. And 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 used discretion. For instance, she wrote the story "In the Village" as a third person narrative. By using this point of view, the reader would only know of the story's autobiographical origins if the reader knew about Bishop's childhood.

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]â€"one does anywayâ€"but these lettersâ€"aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permissionâ€"IF you hadn't changed them ... etc. But art just isn't worth that much."

Later career

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 donâ€™t think I believe in writing courses at allâ€¦ Itâ€™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. Two years after publishing her last book, Geography III (1977), 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. After her death, the Elizabeth Bishop House, an artists' retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia, was dedicated to her memory.

Tributes

Reaching for the Moon (2013) is a Brazilian movie about Bishop's life when she was living in Brazil with Lota de Macedo Soares. The Portuguese title of the film is Flores Raras.

Bishop's friendship with Robert Lowell was the subject of the play Dear Elizabeth by Sarah Ruhl which was first performed at the Yale Repertory Theater in 2012. The play was adapted from the two poets' letters which were collected in the book Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

Works by Bishop

Poetry collections

North & South (Houghton Mifflin, 1946)
Poems: North & South. A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1955) â€"winner of the Pulitzer Prize
A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1956)
Questions of Travel (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965)
The Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969) â€"winner of the National Book Award
Geography III, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976)
The Complete Poems: 1927â€"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)
Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011)

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, Straus & Giroux, 2008)
Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop. George Monteiro Ed. (University Press of Mississippi 1996)

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: The Order of Rio Branco (awarded by the Brazilian government)
1970: National Book Award for Poetry
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
2010: Elected to inaugural class of the New York Writers Hall of Fame

References

Bibliography

Costello, Bonnie (1991). Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBNÂ 0-674-24689-6.Â
Kalstone, David (1989). Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. ISBNÂ 0-374-10960-5.Â
Millier, Brett (1993). Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBNÂ 0-520-07978-7.Â
Nickowitz, Peter. Rhetoric and Sexuality: The Poetry of Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill. Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2006.
Oliveira, Carmen L., trans Neil K. Besner, (2002) Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares (Rutgers University Press, 2002) ISBN 0-8135-3359-7
Page, Chester (2007). Memoirs of a Charmed Life in New York. iUniverse. p.Â 77. ISBNÂ 978-0-595-69771-7.Â
Schwartz, Lloyd and Estess, Sybil P. (1983) Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art University of Michigan Press ISBN 0-472-06343-X
Travisano, Thomas (1988). Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ISBNÂ 0-8139-1159-1.Â
McCabe, Susan (1994) Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss Penn State Press ISBN 0-271-01048-7

External links

Reaching for the Moon (Original title: Flores Raras) - Movie about American poet Elizabeth Bishop - IMDB

Elizabeth Bishop at Find a Grave

Profiles

Profile at the National Book Foundation Poetry Blog
Profile at the Poetry Archive with poems written and audio
Profile and poems at Poets.org
Profile and poems at the Poetry Foundation
Profile and works at Modern American Poetry.

Articles and critical analysis

"Hemingway, Bishop and Key West: Two Writersâ€™ Perspectives", Thomas Travisano, Berfrois, June 15, 2011
Helen Vendler phone interview on Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop audio podcast from The New York Review of Books. (Audio, 28 mins) Accessed 2010-09-11
"Elizabeth Bishop, The Art of Poetry No. 27". Interview in Paris Review Summer 1981 No. 80
"'Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters" April 29, 2008 (audio file 22 mins) from NPR and "Poets' Letters Describe A Love Of Words" December 14, 2008
"Casual Perfection: Why did the publication of Elizabeth Bishop's drafts cause an uproar?" June 13, 2006. Slate Magazine
Works on Paper: the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell The New Yorker 84/35 (November 3, 2008)Â : 106â€"110 Retrieved 2008-04-25
"The Politics of Editing Bishopâ€™s 1962 Brazil Volume for Life World Library", Angus Cleghorn, Berfrois, September 20, 2011
Yale College Lecture on Elizabeth Bishop audio, video and full transcripts from Open Yale Courses. (Audio file, Lecture 24). Yale lecture continued, (Audio file, Lecture 25)

Thursday, March 5, 2015