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.

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.

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.

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.

Words in Air

Words in Air
Author: Elizabeth Bishop
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 1156
Release: 2020-02-18
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0374722870

Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that "you ha[ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend." The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters—they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977. Presented in Words in Air is the complete correspondence between Bishop and Lowell. The substantial, revealing—and often very funny—interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets.

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."

Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker

Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker
Author: Elizabeth Bishop
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011-02-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780374281380

I sort of see you surrounded with fine-tooth combs, sandpaper, nail files, pots of varnish, etc.—with heaps of used commas and semicolons handy, and little useless phrases taken out of their contexts and dying all over the floor," Elizabeth Bishop said upon learning a friend landed a job at The New Yorker in the early 1950s. From 1933 until her death in 1979, Bishop published the vast majority of her poems in the magazine's pages. During those forty years, hundreds of letters passed between Bishop and her editors, Charles Pearce, Katharine White, and Howard Moss. In these letters Bishop discussed the ideas and inspiration for her poems and shared news about her travels, while her editors offered support, commentary, and friendship. Their correspondence provides an unparalleled look into Bishop's writing process, the relationship between a poet and her editors, the internal workings of The New Yorker, and the process of publishing a poem, giving us a rare glimpse into the artistic development of one of the twentieth century's greatest poets.

Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Description

Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Description
Author: Zachariah Pickard
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0773535055

This volume contains a long-overdue account of how Elizabeth Bishop's commitment to scrutiny and description shapes her poetry.

One Art

One Art
Author: Elizabeth Bishop
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 1042
Release: 2015-01-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1466889438

Robert Lowell once remarked, "When Elizabeth Bishop's letters are published (as they will be), she will be recognized as not only one of the best, but one of the most prolific writers of our century." One Art is the magificent confirmation of Lowell's prediction. From several thousand letters, written by Bishop over fifty years—from 1928, when she was seventeen, to the day of her death, in Boston in 1979—Robert Giroux, the poet's longtime friend and editor, has selected over five hundred missives for this volume. In a way, the letters comprise Bishop's autobiography, and Giroux has greatly enhanced them with his own detailed, candid, and highly informative introduction. One Art takes us behind Bishop's formal sophistication and reserve, fully displaying the gift for friendship, the striving for perfection, and the passionate, questing, rigorous spirit that made her a great artist.