EARLY LIFE

 

Elizabeth Bishop was born on February 8, 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts to loving parents. Although they did not know it at the time, their daughter would grow to become a great storyteller and influence in the literary community.

 

Bishop’s father passed away before her first birthday, and her mother was later institutionalized in 1916. Perhaps it is because her life was marked with such early tragedy that her work is most noted for its descriptions and solid detail of her world.

 

Bishop lived with both her maternal and paternal grandparents for a time, moving between Nova Scotia, Canada and Worcester, Massachusetts, and attended the prestigious Walnut Hills School for Girls. She was not happy with the move, and noted so in her later poem, “The Country Mouse,” which shed some light on her years in isolated grandeur: “I had been brought back unconsulted and against my wishes to the house my father had been born in, to be saved from a life of poverty and provincialism.” She wept at her lack of human interaction, with only her grandmother and grandfather for company in their well to-do Worcester house. Thankfully, her time in that house grew shorter as she readied herself for university.

 

SCHOOL & CAREER

 

Bishop and her work blossomed during her years at Vassar College thanks to her friendship and studies with Marianne Moore. Along with a small posse of other students, Bishop went on to found the Con Spirito literary journal. Although its publication was short-lived, the journal with the double-edged title served as an alternative print to the Vassar Review, publishing more daring and avant-garde pieces meant to raise their readers’ awareness of social issues.  

 

Graduation brought with it the desire to travel, and Bishop grabbed life by the horns. She traveled to France, Italy, Africa, and Ireland, taking notes of her travels and turning their descriptions and her experiences into poetry. Her first volume of poetry, North and South, was published in 1946 and inspired by her move to Key West, and she later published her second work, Poems: North and South/ A Cold Spring (1955) with Houghton Mifflin, which later won her the Pulitzer Prize.

 

FRIENDS AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERS

 

Before she left Key West, Bishop met Robert Lowell at a dinner party and started what would become one of her better and longest friendships. Lowell helped her figure out how to grow her work and ability through grants, fellowships, and various techniques. With his help, Bishop became the poetry consultant at the Library of Congress.

 

Bishop fell in love with Brazil after moving to South America in 1951. After a terrible allergic reaction to some local food, she was nursed back to health by her friend Lota de Macedo Soares. But Soares’ involvement with the government and politics in Rio cast a dark shadow over their fifteen years together. Bishop, fearing the worsening political situation in the country, left for New York. Soares later joined her, but overdosed on tranquilizers shortly after her arrival. She was not yet 60 at the time of her death.

 

While greatly affected by the loss of her love and friend, Bishop continued to write and publish. She never saw herself as a “lesbian poet” or a “female poet,” choosing instead to let her work speak for itself. Bishop may have used some personal details in her work, but preferred to take a step back from the subject, giving a detailed if distant account. This contrasts with the confessional poetry of her friend Robert Lowell, who used letters to and from his ex-wife in his book The Dolphin. Bishop wrote to him, urging him to cancel publication: “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 isn’t worth that much.”

 

LATE CAREER & TEACHING

 

Bishop’s talents extended beyond poetry, and her art follows a similar style to her verse. Although she was well off thanks to money from her father and her own success, Bishop chose to paint scenes of significance: focusing on the working class and their methods. Her smaller body of work, Body Type, was still hailed as a significant marker and praised by Ernie Hilbert:

 

“Bishop’s poetics is one distinguished by tranquil observation, craft-like accuracy, care for the small things of the world, a miniaturist discretion and attention. Unlike the pert and wooly poetry that came to dominate American literature by the second half of her life, her poems are balanced like Alexander Calder mobiles, turning so subtly as to seem almost still at first, every element, every weight of meaning and song, poised flawlessly against the next.”

 

Bishop moved on to lecture higher education around 1970, although she still kept up with her writing. In 1971 she began a relationship with Alice Methfessel, another writer, though one who chose to never finish her own projects. Bishop has won several honors since the Pulitzer Prize, and was the first woman and only American to receive the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976.

 

Bishop published her last book, Geography III, in that same year. She passed away several years later due to a cerebral aneurysm in her apartment in Boston, and was later buried in her hometown.