Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979), was an American poet and writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956.

Youth

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. After her father died when she was eight months old, Bishop’s mother descended into mental illness and was institutionalized in 1916. Although Bishop’s mother would live until 1934 in an asylum, they would not meet again. Effectively orphaned, Bishop lived with her grandparents in Nova Scotia, a period she would later idealize in her writing.

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. 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.

Young writer

Bishop was greatly influenced by the poet Marianne Moore to whom she was introduced by the 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."

Bishop traveled widely and lived in many cities and countries, many of which are described in her poems. She lived in France for several years in the mid-1930s, thanks in part to the patronage of Vassar friend, 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.

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. 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.

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 also met James Merrill in 1947, 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. Her first book, North & South: A Cold Spring, 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'.”

Bishop struggled financially through much of her career and increasingly relied on grants, fellowships, and awards to support her writing. Upon receiving a substantial (at the time) $2,500 travelling 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 her collection of poetry, North & South. She later received 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 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 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.

Career as translator

It was during her time in Brazil that Elizabeth Bishop became greatly interested in the languages and literatures of Latin America. She translated into English and was influenced by many poets, among which were the great Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, as well as the great 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.

Personal life

Elizabeth Bishop has become an iconic lesbian poet. She had affairs with women and two long term relationships. The first was with Brazilian socialite and architect Lota de Macedo Soares Soares was descended from a prominent and notable political family; the two lived as a couple for fifteen years. However, in its later years the relationship deteriorated, becoming volatile and tempestuous, marked by bouts of depression, tantrums and alcoholism. 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.

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.

Death

On 6 October 1979 Bishop died of a cerebral hemorrhage in her apartment at Lewis Wharf, Boston. She is buried in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Works

Poetry:

• North & South (Houghton Mifflin, 1946)
• A Cold Spring|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)

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)
• Poems, Prose and Letters Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, eds. (New York: Library of America, 2008) ISBN 978-1-59853-017-9
  

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

Trivia

Bishop's poem "One Art" is featured in the film In Her Shoes when Cameron Diaz's character Maggie reads it to a bedridden professor in a nursing home.

References

Bibliography

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

External links

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• Poems by Elizabeth Bishop at PoetryFoundation.org
• Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar College
• Paper Trail a 2006 interview with Alice Quinn in The Atlantic Monthly