Elizabeth Bishop at Work

Elizabeth Bishop at Work
Author: Eleanor Cook
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2016-08-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0674973143

In her lifetime Elizabeth Bishop was appreciated as a writer’s writer (John Ashbery once called her “the writer’s writer’s writer”). But since her death in 1979 her reputation has grown, and today she is recognized as a major twentieth-century poet. Critics and biographers now habitually praise Bishop’s mastery of her art, but all too often they have little to say about how her poetry does its sublime work—in the ear and in the mind’s eye. Elizabeth Bishop at Work examines Bishop’s art in detail—her diction, syntax, rhythm, and meter, her acute sense of place, and her attention to the natural world. It is also a study of the poet working at something, challenging herself to try new things and to push boundaries. Eleanor Cook traces Bishop’s growing confidence and sense of freedom, from her first collection, North & South, to Questions of Travel, in which she fully realized her poetic powers, to Geography III and the breathtaking late poems, which—in individual ways—gather in and extend the poet’s earlier work. Cook shows how Bishop shapes each collection, putting to rest the notion that her published volumes are miscellanies. Elizabeth Bishop at Work is intended for readers and writers as well as teachers. In showing exactly how Bishop’s poems work, Cook suggests how we ourselves might become more attentive readers and better writers. Bishop has been compared to Vermeer, and as with his paintings, so with her poems. They create small worlds where every detail matters.

Elizabeth Bishop at Work

Elizabeth Bishop at Work
Author: Eleanor Cook
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2016-08-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 067466017X

Index to Bishop's Poems, Stories, and Essays -- General Index

On Elizabeth Bishop

On Elizabeth Bishop
Author: Colm Tóibín
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2025-02-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0691271046

A compelling portrait of a beloved poet from one of today's most acclaimed novelists In this book, novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences—the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own. What emerges is a compelling double portrait that will intrigue readers interested in both Bishop and Tóibín. For Tóibín, the secret of Bishop's emotional power is in what she leaves unsaid. Exploring Bishop’s famous attention to detail, Tóibín describes how Bishop is able to convey great emotion indirectly, through precise descriptions of particular settings, objects, and events. He examines how Bishop’s attachment to the Nova Scotia of her childhood, despite her later life in Key West and Brazil, is related to her early loss of her parents—and how this connection finds echoes in Tóibín’s life as an Irish writer who has lived in Barcelona, New York, and elsewhere. Beautifully written and skillfully blending biography, literary appreciation, and descriptions of Tóibín’s travels to Bishop’s Nova Scotia, Key West, and Brazil, On Elizabeth Bishop provides a fresh and memorable look at a beloved poet even as it gives us a window into the mind of one of today’s most acclaimed novelists.

Poems

Poems
Author: Elizabeth Bishop
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2015-01-13
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 146688942X

A Stirring Collection of Verse Embark on an evocative journey through life and landscape with Poems, an acclaimed anthology by the peerless Elizabeth Bishop. This anthology places the reader at the heart of experience, rendering the grandeur of human existence and our symbiotic relationship with the natural realm, through precision-tuned verse that oscillates between humor and sorrow, acceptance and affliction. Bishop's artistry immerses us in evocative landscapes, from the nostalgic corners of New England, her childhood abode, to the vibrant hues of Brazil and the lush expanses of Florida, her later homes. Rich in geographical motifs, the collection navigates the intertwined tapestry of human life and nature, revealing the poet's intrinsic ability to render chaos into form. A vital presence in twentieth-century literature, this anthology forges an essential window into Bishop's world, offering a comprehensive view into her profound career. Whether you’re new to Bishop's work or a longtime admirer, you’ll discover the unique perspective she brought to English-language poetry, solidifying this anthology as a definitive cornerstone in any poetry collection.

Love Unknown

Love Unknown
Author: Thomas Travisano
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2019-11-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0698191625

An illuminating new biography of one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Bishop "Love Unknown points movingly to the many relationships that moored Bishop, keeping her together even as life—and her own self-destructive tendencies—threatened to split her apart.” —The Wall Street Journal Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that "Elizabeth had more talent for life—and for poetry—than anyone else I've known." This new biography reveals just how she learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters—a remarkable body of work that would make her one of America's most beloved and celebrated poets. In Love Unknown, Thomas Travisano, founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, tells the story of the famous poet and traveler's life. Bishop moved through extraordinary mid-twentieth century worlds with relationships among an extensive international array of literati, visual artists, musicians, scholars, and politicians—along with a cosmopolitan gay underground that was then nearly invisible to the dominant culture. Drawing on fresh interviews and newly discovered manuscript materials, Travisano illuminates that the "art of losing" that Bishop celebrated with such poignant irony in her poem, "One Art," perhaps her most famous, was linked in equal part to an "art of finding," that Bishop's art and life was devoted to the sort of encounters and epiphanies that so often appear in her work.

Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive

Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive
Author: Bethany Hicok
Publisher: Lever Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2020-01-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1643150111

In a life full of chaos and travel, Elizabeth Bishop managed to preserve and even partially catalog, a large collection—more than 3,500 pages of drafts of poems and prose, notebooks, memorabilia, artwork, hundreds of letters to major poets and writers, and thousands of books—now housed at Vassar College. Informed by archival theory and practice, as well as a deep appreciation of Bishop’s poetics, the collection charts new territory for teaching and reading American poetry at the intersection of the institutional archive, literary study, the liberal arts college, and the digital humanities. The fifteen essays in this collection use this archive as a subject, and, for the first time, argue for the critical importance of working with and describing original documents in order to understand the relationship between this most archival of poets and her own archive. This collection features a unique set of interdisciplinary scholars, archivists, translators, and poets, who approach the archive collaboratively and from multiple perspectives. The contributions explore remarkable new acquisitions, such as Bishop’s letters to her psychoanalyst, one of the most detailed psychosexual memoirs of any twentieth century poet and the exuberant correspondence with her final partner, Alice Methfessel, an important series of queer love letters of the 20th century. Lever Press’s digital environment allows the contributors to present some of the visual experience of the archive, such as Bishop’s extraordinary “multi-medial” and “multimodal” notebooks, in order to reveal aspects of the poet’s complex composition process.

Becoming a Poet

Becoming a Poet
Author: David Kalstone
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2001
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780472087204

A celebrated study of Elizabeth Bishop's genius, as revealed through her literary friendships

Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop

Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop
Author: Jonathan Ellis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2018-01-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351957198

In Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop, Jonathan Ellis offers evidence for a redirection in Bishop studies toward a more thorough scrutiny of the links between Bishop's art and life. The book is less concerned with the details of what actually happened to Bishop than with the ways in which she refracted key events into writing: both personal, unpublished material as well as stories, poems, and paintings. Thus, Ellis challenges Bishop's reputation as either a strictly impersonal or personal writer and repositions her poetry between the Modernists on the one hand and the Confessionals on the other. Although Elizabeth Bishop was born and died in Massachusetts, she lived a life more bohemian and varied than that of almost all of her contemporaries, a fact masked by the tendency of biographers and critics to focus on Bishop's life in the United States. Drawing on published works and unpublished material overlooked by many critics, Ellis gives equal attention to the influence of Bishop's Canadian upbringing on her art and to the shifts in her aesthetic and personal tastes that took place during Bishop's residence in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s. By bringing together the whole of Bishop's work, this book opens a welcome new direction in Bishop studies specifically, and in the study of women poets generally.

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop
Author: Thomas J. Travisano
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1988
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780813912264

In this book, the first study of Elizabeth Bishop's whole career, Travisano explores her development as an artist. Through sensitive reading of the poems, supported by comparison with Bishop's letters, interviews, stories, memoirs, and critical essays, he defines the traditions that shaped Bishop's introspective early work and the evolution of her later work toward a more public style.

Geography III

Geography III
Author: Elizabeth Bishop
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 64
Release: 2015-01-13
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1466889411

Whether writing about waiting as a child in a dentist's office, viewing a city from a plane high above, or losing items ranging from door keys to one's lover in the masterfully restrained "One Art," Elizabeth Bishop somehow conveyed both large and small emotional truths in language of stunning exactitude and even more astonishing resonance. As John Ashbery has written, "The private self . . . melts imperceptibly into the large utterance, the grandeur of poetry, which, because it remains rooted in everyday particulars, never sounds ‘grand,' but is as quietly convincing as everyday speech."