Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop (1911 - 1979) was an American poet and writer. Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (1970) and the National Book Award (1970).
- Elizabeth Bishop: Poetry FoundationBishop was a perfectionist who did not write prolifically, preferring instead to spend long periods of time polishing her work. She published only 101 poems during her lifetime.
- Elizabeth Bishop: BritannicaElizabeth Bishop, (born Feb. 8, 1911, Worcester, Mass., U.S.—died Oct. 6, 1979, Boston, Mass.), American poet known for her polished, witty, descriptive verse. Her short stories and her poetry first were published in The New Yorker and other magazines.
Research & Reference
- Elizabeth Bishop: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on Elizabeth Bishop. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
- Guide to the Elizabeth Bishop Papers, circa 1880-1983Correspondence, diaries, notebooks, manuscripts and drafts, memorabilia, artwork, publications, and photographs relating to Bishop's personal and professional life. Also, letters, minutes, contracts, and financial records from her teaching and publishing activities, 1943-1979; manuscripts, typescripts, drafts, revisions, and fragments of her poetry and prose writings, 1929-1979; Vassar student notebooks, travel diaries, notes from her 17-year residence in Brazil, and family information, 1931-1977; manuscripts, typescripts, articles, essays, and poetry by or about other writers, especially Robert Lowell, 1925-1979; and printed poetry, prose, reviews, and articles by or about Bishop.
Elizabeth Bishop
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From childhood in Nova Scotia to travels in Brazil, this program illustrates the geographic spirit of Bishop's life and works with scenes from her poems.
Source: Films on Demand
Author's Works & Perspectives
Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters
James Merrill described Elizabeth Bishop's poems as "more wryly radiant, more touching, more unaffectedly intelligent than any written in our lifetime" and called her "our greatest national treasure." Robert Lowell said, "I enjoy her poems more than anybody else's." Long before a wider public was aware of Bishop's work, her fellow poets expressed astonished admiration of her formal rigor, fiercely observant eye, emotional intimacy, and sometimes eccentric flights of imagination. Today she is recognized as one of America's great poets of the twentieth century. This unprecedented collection offers a full-scale presentation of a writer of startling originality, at once passionate and reticent, adventurous and perfectionist. It presents all the poetry that Elizabeth Bishop published in her lifetime, in such classic volumes as North & South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel, and Geography III. In addition it contains an extensive selection of unpublished poems and drafts of poems (several not previously collected), as well as all her published poetic translations, ranging from a chorus from Aristophanes' The Birds to versions of Brazilian sambas. Poems, Prose, and Letters also brings together most of her published prose writings, including stories; reminiscences; travel writing about the places (Nova Scotia, Florida, Brazil) that so profoundly marked her poetry; and literary essays and statements, including a number of pieces published here for the first time. The book is rounded out with a selection of Bishop's irresistibly engaging and self-revelatory letters. Of the fifty-three letters included here, written between 1933 and 1979, a considerable number are printed for the first time, and all are presented in their entirety. Their recipients include Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, Anne Stevenson, May Swenson, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Inscrutable Houses
Examining the poet's view of the human body and issues of embodiment, Colwell provides an accessible, close reading of Bishop's poetry. Inscrutable Houses examines Elizabeth Bishop's paradoxical relationship to the concept of embodiment as it evolves in the poems of her four published books. Anne Colwell looks at how Bishop uses metaphors of the body to express her powerful ambivalence about human form, at how Bishop moves between pessimism, expressing the idea that the body is the reason for all human loss and misunderstanding, and optimism, seeing the body as the medium for all human connection, for love and knowledge. A combined focus on metaphors of the body in her published work and Bishop's means of arriving at these metaphors through her compositional process therefore highlights important connections between the poet's work and her life, particularly her childhood losses, the influence of contemporary poets, and her personal relationships. Bishop published four collections of poetry, numerous short stories, autobiographical sketches, and several prose pieces on travel. Her double collection titled Poems: North and South--ACold Spring, published in 1955, won the Pulitzer Prize, and the later collection Complete Poems (1969) earned her the National Book Award. Colwell's innovative reading not only is valuable in itself but also gives deeper insight into a great and inßuential poet and contributes to the arguments of more overtly theoretical readings of Bishop's work.
Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It
Elizabeth Bishop dedicated her poetry to telling "what really happened." Yet what really happened in the life on one of the twentieth century's finest and most beloved American poets has eluded readers for years. In this first full biography, Brett Miller pieces together the compelling and painful story of Bishop's life and traces the writing of her brilliantly crafted poems.