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    Elizabeth Bishop Introduction

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    iffinichonchubhair
    Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. She had a difficult childhood as her father died when she was young and her mother was institutionalized for mental illness. Bishop was raised by her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, Canada. She went on to attend Vassar College where she began publishing her poetry. Throughout her life, Bishop struggled with alcoholism and chronic depression. She lived in various places including Florida, New York, Brazil, and later became a professor at Harvard. Bishop published several collections of poetry in her lifetime and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her work. She is regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century.

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    Elizabeth Bishop Introduction

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    iffinichonchubhair
    76 views4 pages
    Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. She had a difficult childhood as her father died when she was young and her mother was institutionalized for mental illness. Bishop was raised by her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, Canada. She went on to attend Vassar College where she began publishing her poetry. Throughout her life, Bishop struggled with alcoholism and chronic depression. She lived in various places including Florida, New York, Brazil, and later became a professor at Harvard. Bishop published several collections of poetry in her lifetime and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her work. She is regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century.

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    Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. She had a difficult childhood as her father died when she was young and her mother was institutionalized for mental illness. Bishop was raised by her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, Canada. She went on to attend Vassar College where she began publishing her poetry. Throughout her life, Bishop struggled with alcoholism and chronic depression. She lived in various places including Florida, New York, Brazil, and later became a professor at Harvard. Bishop published several collections of poetry in her lifetime and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her work. She is regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    76 views4 pages

    Elizabeth Bishop Introduction

    Uploaded by

    iffinichonchubhair
    Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. She had a difficult childhood as her father died when she was young and her mother was institutionalized for mental illness. Bishop was raised by her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, Canada. She went on to attend Vassar College where she began publishing her poetry. Throughout her life, Bishop struggled with alcoholism and chronic depression. She lived in various places including Florida, New York, Brazil, and later became a professor at Harvard. Bishop published several collections of poetry in her lifetime and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her work. She is regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Elizabeth Bishop

    Introduction
    http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/sep/11/william-boyd-elizabeth-bishop-
    brazil

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAiik7SKXX8

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JbffGoIi30 (Reading of Sestina)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g99MyXxAxTQ (Armadillo)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g99MyXxAxTQ (The Filling Station)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJsFCI9_BeA (THe Fish )

    A literary life

    Elizabeth Bishop was born on 8 February 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her


    parents, William Bishop and Gertrude Bulmer (the family name was variously spelt
    Bulmer, with a silent l, and Boomer), were both of Canadian origin.

    Her father died when she was eight months old; her mother never recovered from
    the shock and for the next five years was in and out of mental hospitals, moving
    between Boston, Worcester, and her home town of Great Village in Nova Scotia,
    Canada. In 1916 Gertrude Bulmers insanity was diagnosed as permanent and she
    was institutionalised and separated from her daughter, whom she was never to see
    again. She died in 1934. Elizabeth was reared for the most part by the Boomer
    grandparents in Great Village, with occasional long stays with the wealthy Bishop
    household in Worcester, which she did not enjoy. As a child she suffered severe lung
    illnesses, often having to spend almost entire winters in bed, reading. Chronic
    asthma became a problem for her all her life.

    She describes her early days in Nova Scotia from a childs point of view in the
    autobiographical short story In the Village. The elegy First Death in Nova Scotia
    also draws on some childhood memories. Sestina too evokes the sadness of this
    period. These, and snippets from unpublished poems and papers, point to an
    unsatisfactory relationship with an ill and transient mother. Yet in spite of these
    difficulties her recollections of her Nova Scotia childhood were essentially positive,
    and she had great affection for her maternal grandparents, aunts and uncles in this
    small agricultural village.

    In 1927 she went to Walnut Hill School for girls, a boarding-school in Natick,
    Massachusetts. From 1930 to 1934 she attended Vassar College, an exclusive
    private university in Poughkeepsie, New York, where her fees were paid at first by
    the Bishop family and then by the income from a legacy left by her father. She
    graduated in English literature but also studied Greek and music, and she always
    retained a particular appreciation for Renaissance lyric poetry and for the works of
    Gerard Manley Hopkins. It was at Vassar that she first began to
    publish stories and poems in national magazines and where she met the poet
    Marianne Moore, who became an important influence on her career as a poet and
    with whom she maintained a lifelong friendship and correspondence. It was also at
    Vassar that she formed her first lesbian relationship, and here too, by her own
    admission, that the lifelong problem with alcohol addiction began.

    Between 1935 and 1938 she made a number of trips to Europe, travelling to
    England, Ireland, France, North Africa, Spain and Italy in the company of her friends
    Louise Crane and Margaret Miller, the latter losing an arm in a road accident on the
    trip. Bishop dedicated the poem Quai dOrlans to Miller.

    In 1939 she moved to Key West, Florida, a place she had fallen in love with over the
    previous years. The Fish reflects her enjoyment of the sport of fishing at that time.
    She and Louise Crane bought a house there, now called the Elizabeth Bishop House.
    Later she lived with Marjorie Carr Stevens, to whom Anaphora was dedicated
    posthumously after Stevenss death in 1959. Key West became a sort of refuge and
    base for Bishop over the next fifteen years.

    In 1945 she won the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Award. In 1946 her first book of poetry,
    North and South, was published and was well received by the critics. The Fish is
    among its thirty poems. At this time she met and began a lifelong friendship and
    correspondence with the poet Robert Lowell.

    In 1948 she won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 194950 she was poetry
    consultant to the Library of Congress, supervising its stock of poetry, acquiring new
    works, and providing opinions and advice. The income from this work was important
    to her, as she had dedicated herself exclusively to her poetry, at which she was a
    slow and often erratic worker.

    The years 1945 to 1951, when her life was centred on New York, were very
    unsettled. She felt under extreme pressure in a very competitive literary circle and
    drank heavily. The Bight and The Prodigal reflect this dissolute period of her life.
    In 1947 she began receiving medical support for her chronic depression, asthma
    and alcoholism.

    In 1951 she left for South America on the first stage of a trip around the world. She
    stopped first in Brazil, where she went to visit her old acquaintances Mary Morse
    and Maria Carlota Costellar de Macedo Soares. She was fascinated by the country
    and by Lota Soares, with whom she began a relationship that was to last until
    Soaress death in 1967. They lived in a new house in the luxurious Brazilian
    countryside at Petrpolis. Questions of Travel and The Armadillo reflect this period
    of her life.

    A Cold Spring, her second volume of poetry, was published in 1955. It contains The
    Bight, At the Fishhouses, and The Prodigal.
    In 1956 she won the Pulitzer Prize. In 1957 The Diary of Helena Morley was
    published. This was a translation by Bishop of the diary of a girl aged between
    thirteen and fifteen who lived in the Brazilian village of Diamantina in the 1890s. In
    1965 Questions of Travel, her third volume, was published. Among this selection, as
    well as the title poem, were Sestina, First Death in Nova Scotia and Filling
    Station.

    In 196667 she was poet in residence at the University of Washington in Seattle,


    where she met Suzanne Bowen, who became her secretary, human caretaker and,
    after Soaress death, lover. They lived in San Francisco (196869), where Bishop
    found the new culture bewildering, and then in Brazil, until the tempestuous ending
    of the relationship in 1970.

    In 1969 the Complete Poems was published. In 1970 Bishop won the National Book
    Award for Poetry. She was appointed poet in residence at Harvard University, where
    she taught advanced verse writing and studies in modern poetry for her first year
    and, later, poets and their letters. She described herself as a scared elderly
    amateur prof. It was here she met Alice Methfessel, an administrative assistant who
    became her minder and companion for the remainder of her life. She began to do a
    good many public readings of her poetry to make a living, as she had not been able
    to get much of her money out of Brazil. She continued to teach courses for the
    remainder of her years, though she found the work draining and it interfered with
    her already slow production of poetry. But she needed the money to maintain her
    style of life and to travel.

    In the summer of 1972 she went on a cruise through Scandinavia to the Soviet
    Union. From 1973 to 1977 she secured a four-year contract from Harvard to teach a
    term each year, until her retirement in May 1977. She continued to do public
    readings, punctuated by spells in hospital necessitated by asthma, alcohol and
    depression. She managed to visit Mexico in 1975 and went on a trip to Europe in
    1976.

    In 1976 Geography III was published. Among this slim collection of nine or ten
    poems are In the Waiting Room and The Moose. The poems in this volume show a
    new, more directly personal style and a return to her past and her sense of self in
    search of themes. Competing with failing health, including a bleeding hiatus hernia,
    she continued her usual round of readings, travel and some writing. She died
    suddenly of a brain aneurysm on 6 October 1979.

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