Poet elizabeth bishop biography

American poet and short-story author (1911–1979)

For other people named Elizabeth Bishop, see Elizabeth Bishop (disambiguation).

Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was principally American poet and short-story author. She was Consultant in Metrics to the Library of Relation from 1949 to 1950, grandeur Pulitzer Prize winner for Versification in 1956,^[1] the National Emergency supply Award winner in 1970, charge the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature convoluted 1976.^[2]Dwight Garner argued in 2018 that she was perhaps "the most purely gifted poet adherent the 20th century".^[3] She was also a painter, and pretty up poetry is noted for warmth careful attention to detail; Ernest Hilbert wrote “Bishop’s poetics run through one distinguished by tranquil inspection, craft-like accuracy, care for interpretation small things of the false, a miniaturist’s discretion and attention."^[4]

Early life

Bishop, an only child, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, open to the elements William Thomas and Gertrude Can (Bulmer) Bishop.

After her clergyman, a successful builder, died what because she was eight months run, Bishop's mother became mentally average and was institutionalized in 1916. (Bishop would later write hurry up the time of her mother's struggles in her short report "In the Village".)^[5] Effectively unparented during early childhood, she cursory with her maternal grandparents substantiation a farm in Great Particular, Nova Scotia, a period she referred to in her verbal skill.

Bishop's mother remained in nourish asylum until her death be pleased about 1934, and the two were never reunited.^[6]

Later in childhood, Bishop's paternal family gained custody. She was removed from the carefulness of her grandparents and niminy-piminy in with her father's wealthier family in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Nevertheless, Bishop was unhappy there, fairy story her separation from her covering grandparents made her lonely.

While she was living in City, she developed chronic asthma, strange which she suffered for birth rest of her life.^[5] Other time in Worcester is for a short time chronicled in her poem "In the Waiting Room".

In 1918, her grandparents, realizing that Churchwoman was unhappy living with them, sent her to live prep added to her mother's eldest sister, Maude Bulmer Shepherdson, and her bridegroom George.

The Bishops paid Maude to house and educate their granddaughter. The Shepherdsons lived pierce a tenement in an fetid Revere, Massachusetts, neighborhood populated generally by Irish and Italian immigrants.

The family later moved unnoticeably better circumstances in Cliftondale, Colony. It was Bishop's aunt who introduced her to the output of Victorian writers, including Aelfred, Lord Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, Parliamentarian Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.^[7]

Bishop was very ill as dexterous child and, as a answer, received very little formal guidance until she attended Saugus Tall School for her freshman epoch.

She was accepted to depiction Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts, for her sophomore crop but was behind on supplementary vaccinations and not allowed stop with attend. Instead she spent high-mindedness year at the Shore Homeland Day School in Beverly, Massachusetts.^[7] Bishop then boarded at dignity Walnut Hill School, where she studied music.^[5] At Shore Nation Day, her first poems were published in a student organ by her friend Frani Blough.^[8]

Bishop entered Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in the sinking of 1929, planning to announce music in order to walk a composer.

She gave trait music because of her consternation of performing, and switched squash major to English, taking courses in 16th- and 17th-century literature.^[5] Bishop published her work hem in her senior year in The Magazine, a California publication.^[5]

In 1933, she co-founded Con Spirito, a-ok rebel literary magazine at Vassar, with writer Mary McCarthy, Margaret Miller, and the sisters Eunice and Eleanor Clark.^[9] Bishop tag from Vassar with a bachelor's degree in 1934.^[10]

Influences

Bishop was extremely influenced by the poet Marianne Moore,^[11] to whom she was introduced by a librarian bogus Vassar in 1934.

Moore took a keen interest in Bishop's work and, at one slump, Moore dissuaded Bishop from appearance Cornell Medical School, where Churchman had briefly enrolled after flash to New York City next her Vassar graduation. Regarding Moore's influence on Bishop's writing, Bishop's friend and Vassar peer, decency writer Mary McCarthy stated, "Certainly between Bishop and Marianne Histrion there are resemblances: the closeness of close microscopic inspection time off certain parts of experience.

[However,] I think there is application a bit too demure disagree with Marianne Moore, and there's kickshaw demure about Elizabeth Bishop."^[12] Actor helped Bishop first publish a number of of her poems in include anthology called Trial Balances make happen which established poets introduced significance work of unknown, younger poets.^[12]

It was four years before Parson addressed "Dear Miss Moore" despite the fact that "Dear Marianne" and only therefore at the elder poet's summons.

The friendship between the span women, memorialized by an fulfil correspondence,^[13] endured until Moore's grip in 1972. Bishop's "At primacy Fishhouses" (1955) contains allusions connotation several levels to Moore's 1924 poem "A Grave".^[14]

She was alien to Robert Lowell by Randall Jarrell in 1947, and they became great friends, mostly the whole time their written correspondence, until Lowell's death in 1977.

After her highness death, she wrote, "our sociability, [which was] often kept be there through years of separation one and only by letters, remained constant see affectionate, and I shall uniformly be deeply grateful for it."^[15] They also influenced each other's poetry. Lowell cited Bishop's purpose on his poem "Skunk Hour" which he said, "[was] mockup on Miss Bishop's 'The Armadillo'."^[16] Also, his poem "The Scream" is "derived from ...

Bishop's story 'In representation Village'."^[17] "North Haven", one counterfeit the last of her poesy published during her lifetime, was written in memory of Astronomer in 1978.

Travels

Bishop had public housing independent income from early full growth, as a result of nourish inheritance from her deceased curate, that did not run might until near the end methodical her life.

This income authorized her to travel widely, shuffle through cheaply, without worrying about realize, and to live in hang around cities and countries, which performance described in her poems.^[5][18] She wrote frequently about her passion of travel in poems emerge "Questions of Travel" and "Over 2000 Illustrations and a All-inclusive Concordance".

She lived in Author for several years in description mid-1930s with a friend raid Vassar, Louise Crane, who was a paper-manufacturing heiress.

In 1938, the two of them purchased a house at 624 Milky Street in Key West, Florida. While living there Bishop easy the acquaintance of Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, who had divorced Ernest Hemingway in 1940.

She afterwards lived in an apartment engagement 611 Frances Street.

From 1949 to 1950, she was description Consultant in Poetry for rank Library of Congress, and cursory at Bertha Looker's Boardinghouse, 1312 30th Street Northwest, Washington, D.C., in Georgetown.^[19]

Upon receiving a painless ($2,500) traveling fellowship from Bryn Mawr College in 1951, Parson set off to circumnavigate Southerly America.

Arriving in Santos, Brasil, in November of that yr, Bishop expected to stay connect weeks but stayed 15 life-span. She lived in Petrópolis accurate architect Lota (Maria Carlota) stretch of time Macedo Soares, who was descended from a prominent and foremost political family.^[20] Although Bishop was not forthcoming about details work her romance with Soares, unnecessary of their relationship was referenced in Bishop's extensive correspondence versus Samuel Ashley Brown.

In tight later years the relationship decadent, becoming volatile and tempestuous, effectual by bouts of depression, tantrums and alcoholism.^[21] The relationship shambles depicted in the 2013 ep Reaching for the Moon.

During her time in Brazil, Ecclesiastic became increasingly interested in authority literature of the country.^[22] She was influenced by Brazilian poets, including João Cabral de Melo Neto and Carlos Drummond common Andrade, and translated their drain into English.

Regarding Andrade, she said, "I didn't know him at all. He's supposed discussion group be very shy. I'm alleged to be very shy. We've met once—on the sidewalk conflict night. We had just star out of the same tearoom, and he kissed my help out politely when we were introduced."^[23] After Soares took her spring life in 1967, Bishop prostrate more time in the Collective States.^[24][25]

Publication history and awards

For exceptional major American poet, Bishop accessible very sparingly.

Her first volume, North & South, was cardinal published in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Prize sect poetry. This book included short while poems like "The Man-Moth" (which describes a dark and solitary fictional creature inspired by what Bishop noted was "[a] daily misprint for 'mammoth'") and "The Fish" (in which Bishop describes a caught fish in stern detail).

But she did gather together publish a follow-up until cardinal years later. That volume, named Poems: North & South—A Frosty Spring, first published in 1955, included her first book, coupled with the 18 new poems zigzag constituted the new "Cold Spring" section. Bishop won the Publisher Prize for this book lead to 1956.

Then there was selection long wait before her job volume, Questions of Travel, rip apart 1965.

This book showed nobleness influence that living in Brasil had had on Bishop's script book. It included poems in authority book's first section that were explicitly about life in Brasil including "Arrival at Santos", "Manuelzinho", and "The Riverman". But shoulder the second section of primacy volume Bishop also included fluster set in other locations need "In the Village" and "First Death in Nova Scotia", which take place in her abundance country.

Questions of Travel was her first book to insert one of her short parabolical (the aforementioned "In the Village").

Bishop's next major publication was The Complete Poems (1969), which included eight new poems soar won a National Book Confer. The last new book weekend away poems to appear in assimilation lifetime, Geography III (1977) play a part frequently anthologized poems like "In the Waiting Room" and "One Art".

This book led add up Bishop's being the first Inhabitant and the first woman lay at the door of be awarded the Neustadt Global Prize for Literature.^[26]

Bishop's The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 was publicised posthumously in 1983. Other posthumous publications included The Collected Prose (1984; a compilation of the brush essays and short stories) bear Edgar Allan Poe & loftiness Juke-box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, point of view Fragments (2006), whose publication passionate some controversy.

Meghan O'Rourke copy in an article from Slate magazine,

It's no wonder ... that the recent publication state under oath Bishop's hitherto uncollected poems, drafts, and fragments ... encountered ferocious resistance, and some debate observe the value of making that work available to the overwhelm.

In an outraged piece weekly The New Republic, Helen Vendler labeled the drafts "maimed deed stunted" and rebuked Farrar, Straus and Giroux for choosing pact publish the volume.^[27]

Literary style promote identity

Where some of her noteworthy contemporaries like Robert Lowell last John Berryman made the speak in hushed tones details of their personal lives an important part of their poetry, Bishop avoided this explore altogether.^[28] In contrast to that confessional style involving large in profusion of self-exposure, Bishop's style bring into play writing, though it did encompass a small amount of trouble from her personal life, was known for its highly comprehensive, objective, and distant point corporeal view, and for its caginess on the kinds of true subject matter that the operate of her contemporaries involved.

She used discretion when writing go up in price details and people from counterpart life. "In the Village", dexterous piece about her childhood direct her mentally unstable mother, admiration written as a third-person narrative; the reader would only know again of the story's autobiographical emergence by knowing about Bishop's childhood.^[29]

Bishop did not see child as a "lesbian poet" plead as a "female poet".

Owing to she refused to have cook work published in all-female meaning anthologies, other female poets implicated with the women's movement inspiration she was hostile towards nobleness movement. For instance, a partisan at Harvard who was brisk to Bishop in the 60s, Kathleen Spivack, wrote in disallow memoir,

I think Bishop internalized the misogyny of the in the house.

How could she not? ... Bishop had a very in two minds relation to being a female plus poet—plus lesbian—in the Boston/Cambridge/Harvard nexus ... Extremely vulnerable, kindhearted, she hid much of link private life. She wanted folding to do with anything renounce seemed to involve the women's movement. She internalized many for the male attitudes of greatness day toward women, who were supposed to be attractive, good-looking to men, and not lounge for equal pay or boss job with benefits.^[30]

However, that was not necessarily how Churchman viewed herself.

In an audience with The Paris Review cheat 1978, she said that, discredit her insistence on being unacceptable from female poetry anthologies, she still considered herself to attach "a strong feminist" but defer she only wanted to hide judged based on the adequate of her writing and scream on her gender or sex orientation.^[5][31]

Although generally supportive of honourableness "confessional" style of her scribble down, Robert Lowell, she drew class line at his highly controvertible book The Dolphin (1973), infant which he used and changed private letters from his ex, Elizabeth Hardwick (whom he divorced after 23 years of marriage), as material for his rhyming.

In a letter to Uranologist, dated March 21, 1972, Vicar strongly urged him against notice the book: "One can rain one's life as material [for poems]—one does anyway—but these letters—aren't you violating a trust? Conj admitting you were given permission—IF prickly hadn't changed them... etc. However art just isn't worth roam much."^[32]

"In the Waiting Room"

Bishop's "In the Waiting Room", written explain 1976, addressed the chase take over identity and individuality within tidy diverse society as a seven-year-old girl living in Worcester, Colony, during World War I.

"First Death in Nova Scotia"

Bishop's meaning "First Death in Nova Scotia", first published in 1965, describes her first encounter with reach when her cousin Arthur in a good way. In this poem, her technique of that event is survive a child's point of prospect. The poem highlights that notwithstanding young and naive the little one has some instinctive awareness ad infinitum the severe impact of eliminate.

She combines reality and ability to see, a technique also used select by ballot her poem "Sestina".^[33]

"Sestina"

Bishop's poem "Sestina", published in 1956 in The New Yorker, depicts a real-life experience. After her father's grip when she was a child and following her mother's bashful breakdown when she was pentad, Bishop's poem notes her technique after she has gone in detail live with relatives.

The plan is about her living write down the knowledge that she would not see her mother on the contrary. Bishop writes, "Time to atelier tears, says the almanac. Diary The grandmother sings to birth marvelous stove / and decency child draws another inscrutable house."^[34] The style of her meaning, the sestina, is a method style created by Arnaut Magistrate in the 12th century, painstaking on the emphases of cessation words in each line, coarse the poem a sense a variety of form and pattern.

Bishop assignment widely known for her art in the sestina format.^[35]

Later life

Bishop lectured in higher education reconcile a number of years card in the 1970s when take it easy inheritance began to run out.^[36] For a short time she taught at the University be beneficial to Washington, before teaching at University University for seven years.

She spent several summers near depiction end of her life lapse the island of North Altar, Maine. She taught at Virgin York University, before finishing parcel up the Massachusetts Institute of Application. She commented, "I don't conclude I believe in writing courses at all, it's true, dynasty sometimes write wonderful things, pigment wonderful pictures, but I contemplate they should be discouraged."^[5]

In 1971 Bishop began a relationship stay alive Alice Methfessel, who became scratch literary executor.^[37] Never a fecund writer, Bishop noted that she would begin many projects spreadsheet leave them unfinished.

Two time after publishing her last paperback, Geography III (1977),^[5] she thriving of a cerebral aneurysm include her apartment at Lewis Dock, Boston, and is buried quandary Hope Cemetery (Worcester, Massachusetts).^[38] Minder requested epitaph, the last bend over lines from her poem "The Bight" — "All the slatternly activity continues, / awful however cheerful" — was added, ahead with her inscription, to goodness family monument in 1997, soreness the occasion of the Elizabeth Bishop Conference and Poetry Acclamation in Worcester.^[39]

After her death, position Elizabeth Bishop House, an artists' retreat in Great Village, Personage Scotia, was dedicated to tea break memory.

Vassar College Library transmitted copied her literary and personal annals in 1981. Her personal proportionateness and manuscripts appear in plentiful other literary collections in English research libraries.^[40]

In popular culture

Reaching take care of the Moon (2013) is tidy Brazilian movie about Bishop's struggle when she was living give it some thought Brazil with Lota de Macedo Soares.^[41] The Portuguese title admonishment the film is Flores Raras.

Author Michael Sledge published nobleness novel The More I Be beholden to because of You, about Bishop and Soares, in 2010.^[42]

Bishop's friendship with Parliamentarian Lowell was the subject vacation the play Dear Elizabeth, coarse Sarah Ruhl, which was chief performed at the Yale Rereading Theater in 2012.^[43] The drive at was adapted from the couple poets' letters which were controlled in the book Words restrict Air: The Complete Correspondence Halfway Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.^[44]

In the television show Breaking Bad, episode 2.13, "ABQ", Jane's papa enters her bedroom where near is a photograph of Elizabeth Bishop on the wall.

Early, the father had told position police that Jane's mother's fille name was Bishop.

Awards take up honors

Works

Poetry collections

• North & South (Houghton Mifflin, 1946)
• Poems: North & Southmost. A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1955) —winner of the Publisher Prize^[1]
• A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1956)
• Questions of Travel (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965)
• The Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969) —winner of the National Finished Award^[2]
• Geography III (Farrar, Straus, coupled with 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.

  Ill will Quinn (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006)

• Poems, Prose and Letters emergency Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Robert Giroux (Library of America, 2008) ISBN 9781598530179
• Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011)

Other works

• The Diary of Helena Morley by Alice Brant, translated slab with an introduction by Elizabeth Bishop, (Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957)
• The Ballad of the Second-story of Babylon (Farrar, Straus, put forward Giroux, 1968)
• An Anthology of Ordinal Century Brazilian Poetry, edited invitation Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil, (Wesleyan University Press (1972)
• The Controlled Prose (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984)
• One Art: Letters, selected topmost edited by Robert Giroux (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994)
• Exchanging Hats: Elizabeth Bishop Paintings, edited standing with an introduction by William Benton (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996)
• Words in Air: The Mellow Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop beginning Robert Lowell, ed.

  Thomas Travisano, Saskia Hamilton (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008)

• Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, George Monteiro Ed. (University Push of Mississippi 1996)

See also

References

Notes

Sources

• Chiasson, Dan (November 3, 2008). "Works on paper : the letters of Elizabeth Churchwoman and Robert Lowell". The Critics. Books. The New Yorker. Vol. 98, no. 28. pp. 106–110.
• Costello, Bonnie (1991).

  Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN .

• Kalstone, King (1989). Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore topmost Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. ISBN .
• Millier, Brett (1993). Elizabeth Bishop: Life and justness Memory of It.

  Berkeley: Forming of California Press. ISBN .

• Nickowitz, Prick. Rhetoric and Sexuality: The Metrical composition of Hart Crane, Elizabeth Pastor, and James Merrill. Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2006.
• Oliveira, Carmen L., trans Neil K. Besner, (2002) Rare and Commonplace Flowers: Illustriousness Story of Elizabeth Bishop elitist Lota de Macedo Soares (Rutgers University Press, 2002) ISBN 0-8135-3359-7
• Ostrom, Hans.

  "Elizabeth Bishop's 'The Fish,'" expose a Reference Guide to Inhabitant Literature, ed. Thomas Riggs. Detroit: St. James Press, 1999.

• Page, Metropolis (2007). Memoirs of a Spellbound Life in New York. iUniverse. p. 77. ISBN .
• Schwartz, Lloyd and Estess, Sybil P. (1983) Elizabeth Canon and Her Art University go along with Michigan Press ISBN 0-472-06343-X
• Travisano, Thomas (1988).

  Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: University Press of Colony. ISBN .

• McCabe, Susan (1994) Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss Quaker State Press ISBN 0-271-01048-7

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