North and South. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946. Print.

Content:

Most of these poems were written, or partly written, before 1942.

North and South begins with “The Map,” noting that Bishop can take the reader anywhere in the world. From the beginning her attention to detail helps us recall the landscape she describes, while her final line of the poem, “More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors,” says she knows the power of her own words. The poems comprising this work are as follows:

“The Map”
“The Imaginary Iceberg”
“Casabianca”
“The Color of the Air”
“Wading at Wellfleet”
“Chemin de Fer”
“The Gentleman of Shalott”
“Large Bad Picture”
“From The Country to the City”
“The Man-Moth”
“Love Lies Sleeping”
“A Miracle for Breakfast”
“The Weed”
“The Unbeliever”
“The Monument”
“Paris, 7AM”
“Quai d’Orleans”
“Sleeping on the Ceiling”
“Sleeping Standing Up”
“Cirque d’Hiver”
“Florida”
“Jeronimo’s House”
“Roosters”
“Seascape”
“Little Exercise”
“The Fish”
“Late Air”
“Cootchie”
“Songs for a Colored Singer”
“Anaphora”

Each poem is in distinct stanzas, but some, like “The Man-Moth” (a newspaper misprint for “mammoth”) leaves a smaller poem in the wake of a larger picture. The misprint itself, from that one word, gives a completely different reading than the meaning of each first line strung together. The first lines of each stanza read, “Here, above/ But when the Man-Moth/ Up the facades/ Then he returns/ Each night he must/ If you catch him.”

Critical Reaction:

Ashbery, John ed. Eugene Richie. Selected Prose. USA: 2004. The University of Michigan Press. Print.

“From the moment Miss Bishop appeared on the scene it was apparent to everybody that she was a poet of strange, even mysterious, but undeniable and great gifts. Her first volume, North and South (1946), was the unanimous choice of the judges in a publisher’s contest to which eight hundred manuscripts were submitted. Her second won the Pulitzer Prize. One of her poems is enough to convince you that you are in expert hand and can relax and enjoy the ride: in the words of Maruanne Moore reviewing North and South, ‘At last we have someone who knows and is not didactic.’ Few contemporary poets can claim both virtues.”

Travisano, Thomas. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. 1989. University of Virginia Press. Print.

“Bishop was fortunate to launch her career at a time when she could choose among a wide range of viable poetic idioms. She seems never to have felt that oppression in the face of her achievement of her modernist predecessors that James Breslin argues was an essential characteristic in her generation.”

Prizes and Awards:

Winner of the Tenth Anniversary Houghton Mifflin Fellowship Award For a Volume of Poetry

North & South (1946)

Bishop, Elizabeth. North and South. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946. Print.

Content:

Most of these poems were written, or partly written, before 1942.

North and South begins with “The Map,” noting that Bishop can take the reader anywhere in the world. From the beginning her attention to detail helps us recall the landscape she describes, while her final line of the poem, “More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors,” says she knows the power of her own words. The poems comprising this work are as follows:

“The Map”
“The Imaginary Iceberg”
“Casabianca”
“The Color of the Air”
“Wading at Wellfleet”
“Chemin de Fer”
“The Gentleman of Shalott”
“Large Bad Picture”
“From The Country to the City”
“The Man-Moth”
“Love Lies Sleeping”
“A Miracle for Breakfast”
“The Weed”
“The Unbeliever”
“The Monument”
“Paris, 7AM”
“Quai d’Orleans”
“Sleeping on the Ceiling”
“Sleeping Standing Up”
“Cirque d’Hiver”
“Florida”
“Jeronimo’s House”
“Roosters”
“Seascape”
“Little Exercise”
“The Fish”
“Late Air”
“Cootchie”
“Songs for a Colored Singer”
“Anaphora”

Each poem is in distinct stanzas, but some, like “The Man-Moth” (a misprint for “mammoth”) leaves a smaller poem in the wake of a larger picture. The misprint itself, from that one word, gives a completely different reading than the meaning of each first line strung together. The first lines of each stanza read, “Here, above/ But when the Man-Moth/ Up the facades/ Then he returns/ Each night he must/ If you catch him.”

Critical Reaction:

“From the moment Miss Bishop appeared on the scene it was apparent to everybody that she was a poet of strange, even mysterious, but undeniable and great gifts. Her first volume, North and South (1946), was the unanimous choice of the judges in a publisher’s contest to which eight hundred manuscripts were submitted. Her second won the Pulitzer Prize. One of her poems is enough to convince you that you are in expert hand and can relax and enjoy the ride: in the words of Maruanne Moore reviewing North and South, ‘At last we have someone who knows and is not didactic.’ Few contemporary poets can claim both virtues.”

Ashbery, John ed. Eugene Richie. Selected Prose. USA: 2004. The University of Michigan Press. Print.

“Bishop was fortunate to launch her career at a time when she could choose among a wide range of viable poetic idioms. She seems never to have felt that oppression in the face of her achievement of her modernist predecessors that James Breslin argues was an essential characteristic in her generation.”

Travisano, Thomas. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. 1989. University of Virginia Press. Print.

Prizes and Award:

Winner of the Tenth Anniversary Houghton Mifflin Fellowship Award For a Volume of Poetry