Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and writer of short stories. She worked as a Poetry Advisor for the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950. In 1956, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In 1970, she received the National Book Award. In 1976, she was given the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Dwight Garner wrote in 2018 that Bishop might have been "the most talented poet of the 20th century." She also painted, and her poetry is known for its focus on small details. Ernest Hilbert said her writing shows careful observation and attention to small things in the world.

Early life

Elizabeth Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts, to William Thomas and Gertrude May (Bulmer) Bishop. She was an only child. Her father, a successful builder, died when she was eight months old. Her mother later became mentally ill and was sent to a mental health facility in 1916. Bishop wrote about this time in her short story "In the Village." Without a mother, Bishop lived with her maternal grandparents on a farm in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Her mother remained in the facility until her death in 1934, and Bishop never saw her again.

Later, Bishop’s paternal family took custody of her. She was moved from her grandparents’ home to live with her father’s family in Worcester, Massachusetts. However, Bishop felt lonely there because she was separated from her maternal grandparents.

While living in Worcester, Bishop developed chronic asthma, a condition she had for the rest of her life. Her time there is briefly described in her poem "In the Waiting Room." In 1918, Bishop’s paternal grandparents, noticing her unhappiness, sent her to live with her mother’s oldest sister, Maude Bulmer Shepherdson, and her husband, George.

The Bishops paid Maude to care for and educate their granddaughter. The Shepherdsons lived in a poor neighborhood in Revere, Massachusetts, where many Irish and Italian immigrants lived. Later, the family moved to a better home in Cliftondale, Massachusetts. Bishop’s aunt introduced her to the works of famous Victorian writers, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Bishop was very sick as a child and received little formal schooling until she attended Saugus High School for her freshman year. She was accepted to Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts, for her sophomore year, but she was not allowed to attend because she had not completed required vaccinations. Instead, she spent that year at Shore Country Day School in Beverly, Massachusetts. Bishop later lived at Walnut Hill School for her junior and senior years, where she studied music.

At Shore Country Day School, Bishop’s first poems were published in a student magazine by her friend Frani Blough.

In 1929, Bishop entered Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, planning to study music and become a composer. She later switched her major to English, studying 16th- and 17th-century literature. Bishop published her work in her senior year in The Magazine, a publication from California.

In 1933, Bishop co-founded Con Spirito, a literary magazine at Vassar, with writer Mary McCarthy, Margaret Miller, and the sisters Eunice and Eleanor Clark. Bishop graduated from Vassar in 1934 with a bachelor’s degree in English.

Influences

Elizabeth Bishop was greatly influenced by the poet Marianne Moore, who was introduced to Bishop by a librarian at Vassar College in 1934. Moore showed strong interest in Bishop’s work and once persuaded Bishop not to attend Cornell Medical School. Bishop had briefly enrolled there after moving to New York City following her graduation from Vassar. Mary McCarthy, a friend of Bishop and a fellow student at Vassar, noted that Bishop and Moore shared a similar way of closely examining parts of life in their writing. However, McCarthy believed Moore was more reserved, while Bishop was not. Moore helped Bishop publish some of her poems in an anthology called Trial Balances, where well-known poets introduced the work of younger, unknown poets.

It took four years before Bishop began calling Moore “Dear Marianne” instead of “Dear Miss Moore,” and only after Moore invited her to do so. Their friendship, remembered through many letters they wrote to each other, lasted until Moore’s death in 1972. Bishop’s poem “At the Fishhouses” (1955) includes references to Moore’s 1924 poem “A Grave.”

Bishop met Robert Lowell in 1947 through the poet Randall Jarrell. They became close friends, mostly through letters they wrote to each other, until Lowell’s death in 1977. After Lowell’s death, Bishop wrote that their friendship, kept alive through years of separation by letters, remained strong and kind. She said she would always be grateful for their friendship. Lowell also said Bishop’s work influenced his poem “Skunk Hour,” which he called “modeled on Miss Bishop’s ‘The Armadillo.’” His poem “The Scream” was based on Bishop’s story “In the Village.” Bishop’s poem “North Haven,” one of her last published works, was written in memory of Lowell in 1978.

Another poet Bishop often mentioned as important to her ideas about mystery and accuracy was the French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire. Samuel Ashley Brown noted that Bishop kept a photograph of Baudelaire near her writing desk. Baudelaire inspired Bishop with his focus on life in cities and how it affects the senses, including the mix of real and unreal experiences.

In 1924, Bishop first read the work of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in Harriet Monroe’s Anthology of Modern Poets. Her interest in Hopkins continued during her time at Vassar College, leading to her first essay, “Notes on Timing in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” published in the Vassar Review in February 1934.

While Hopkins’ vivid descriptions of nature and clear metaphors interested Bishop, she was most influenced by his use of rhythm and sound in poetry. For example, Bishop’s use of repeated sounds and hyphens can be seen in her poem “Song for the Rainy Season.” In her final poem, “Sonnet,” it is believed Bishop honored Hopkins and remembered his strong, lively style.

Travels

Bishop received money from her father’s inheritance early in her adult life. This money lasted until near the end of her life and allowed her to travel to many places without worrying about money. She lived in many cities and countries, which she wrote about in her poems. She often wrote about her love of travel in poems such as "Questions of Travel" and "Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance." In the mid-1930s, she lived in France for several years with a friend named Louise Crane, who was the daughter of a wealthy family involved in paper manufacturing.

In 1938, Bishop and Louise Crane bought a house at 624 White Street in Key West, Florida. While living there, Bishop met Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, who had divorced Ernest Hemingway in 1940. Later, she lived in an apartment at 611 Frances Street.

From 1949 to 1950, Bishop worked as the Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress and lived at Bertha Looker's Boardinghouse, located at 1312 30th Street Northwest in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

In 1951, Bishop received a large traveling fellowship from Bryn Mawr College, worth $2,500. She used this money to travel around South America. She arrived in Santos, Brazil, in November 1951 and planned to stay for two weeks but remained there for 15 years. During this time, she lived in Petrópolis with an architect named Lota (Maria Carlota) de Macedo Soares, who came from a well-known political family. Bishop did not share many details about her relationship with Soares, but letters she wrote to Samuel Ashley Brown provide much information about their time together. Later, their relationship became difficult and emotional, marked by sadness, anger, and alcohol use. This relationship is shown in the 2013 film Reaching for the Moon.

While in Brazil, Bishop became more interested in Brazilian literature. She was influenced by Brazilian poets such as João Cabral de Melo Neto and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and she translated their work into English. She once said about Andrade, "I didn’t know him at all. He’s supposed to be very shy. I’m supposed to be very shy. We’ve met once—on the sidewalk at night. We had just come out of the same restaurant, and he kissed my hand politely when we were introduced." After Soares died by suicide in 1967, Bishop spent more time in the United States.

Publication history and awards

Elizabeth Bishop, a major American poet, published her work very rarely. Her first book, North & South, was published in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Prize for poetry. This book included important poems such as "The Man-Moth" (which describes a dark and lonely creature inspired by a newspaper mistake that said "mammoth" instead of "man-moth") and "The Fish" (which gives a detailed description of a fish that has been caught). Bishop did not publish another book until nine years later. That book, titled Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring, was first published in 1955. It included her first book along with 18 new poems in the "Cold Spring" section. Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize for this book in 1956.

Another long time passed before her next book, Questions of Travel, was published in 1965. This book showed how living in Brazil influenced Bishop’s writing. The first section included poems about life in Brazil, such as "Arrival at Santos," "Manuelzinho," and "The Riverman." The second section included poems set in other places, like "In the Village" and "First Death in Nova Scotia," which take place in Bishop’s home country. Questions of Travel was Bishop’s first book to include one of her short stories, "In the Village."

Bishop’s next major publication was The Complete Poems (1969), which included eight new poems and won a National Book Award. The last new book of poems she published during her lifetime, Geography III (1977), included poems often found in collections, such as "In the Waiting Room" and "One Art." This book made Bishop the first American and the first woman to receive the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

After Bishop passed away, her book The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 was published in 1983. Other posthumous works included The Collected Prose (1984; a collection of her essays and short stories) and Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (2006), which caused some debate. Meghan O'Rourke wrote in an article from Slate magazine:

"It is no surprise that the recent publication of Bishop’s previously uncollected poems, drafts, and fragments faced strong opposition and discussion about whether this work should be shared with the public. Helen Vendler criticized the drafts in an article for The New Republic, calling them 'maimed and stunted' and criticizing the publisher for releasing the book."

However, Bishop’s posthumous publications continued. In the spring of 2008, Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters, edited by Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, was released by the Library of America. This book made hundreds of pages of previously unpublished poems, letters, and book reviews available to the public.

Later that year, in the fall, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton, was published. This collection included nearly 900 pages of private letters between Bishop and Robert Lowell, a major American poet. These new editions expanded the range of Bishop’s work and provided new insights into her personal life, revealing a side of her that was known only to a few close friends.

Literary style and identity

Elizabeth Bishop's writing style differed from that of her contemporaries, such as Robert Lowell and John Berryman, who often included personal details from their lives in their poetry. Bishop, however, rarely shared personal information in her work. Instead, she focused on detailed, objective descriptions and avoided discussing private matters. As Kirstin Hotelling Zona, an assistant professor at Illinois State University, explains in The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop, "For Elizabeth Bishop, writing poetry was more about exploring how the self is shaped by the world than about expressing personal feelings."

Bishop was careful about including details or people from her life in her poems. For example, her poem "In the Village," which reflects on her childhood and her mother's mental health, is written from a third-person perspective. Readers would only recognize its connection to Bishop's life if they knew about her personal history.

Bishop did not identify herself as a "lesbian poet" or a "female poet." She refused to publish her work in all-female poetry collections, which led some female poets involved in the women's movement to believe she opposed the movement. Kathleen Spivack, a Harvard student who knew Bishop in the 1960s, wrote in her memoir: "Bishop felt the effects of the time's attitudes toward women. She had uncertain feelings about being a woman and a poet in the Boston/Cambridge/Harvard area. She avoided sharing much of her private life and wanted no connection to the women's movement. She adopted many of the male attitudes of the time, which suggested women should be attractive and not demand equality."

However, Bishop did not see herself this way. In a 1978 interview with The Paris Review, she said she considered herself a "strong feminist" but wanted to be judged only on the quality of her writing, not on her gender or sexual orientation.

Although Bishop supported the confessional style of her friend Robert Lowell, she opposed his controversial book The Dolphin (1973), in which he used and altered private letters from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. In a letter to Lowell dated March 21, 1972, Bishop urged him not to publish the book: "One can use life as material for poems—but these letters are private. Are you not breaking a trust? Art is not worth that."

Bishop's poem "In the Waiting Room," written in 1976, describes a seven-year-old girl's search for identity in a diverse society during World War I. Her poem "First Death in Nova Scotia," first published in 1965, recalls her first experience with death as a child, showing how a young person can sense the impact of loss. The poem blends reality and imagination, a technique also seen in her poem "Sestina."

Bishop's poem "Sestina," published in The New Yorker in 1956, reflects a real-life experience. After her father's death and her mother's mental breakdown, Bishop lived with relatives and wrote about the sorrow of knowing she would not see her mother again. The poem begins: "Time to plant tears, says the almanac. / The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove / and the child draws another inscrutable house." The sestina, a poetic form developed in the 12th century by Arnaut Daniel, focuses on repeating the ending words of each line, creating a structured pattern. Bishop is well-known for her skill in using this form.

Teaching career

After the death of her long-term partner, Lota (Maria Carlota) de Macedo Soares, Bishop returned to the United States. She later worked at Harvard University until her death in 1979. Before this, she held teaching positions at several universities during the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the University of Washington (1966), Harvard University (1970–1977), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979).

She became a teacher mainly because she needed money. She had used up her father’s inheritance and decided to teach workshops and seminars at universities to support herself. Students described her as "tactful," but a journal article titled Elizabeth Bishop: Conversations and Class Notes shows she was upset by students’ poor grammar, incorrect language use, and unclear speech. In conversations with Wesley Wehr and notes from her 1966 workshops at the University of Washington, she wrote, "I found out the other day, to my horror, that they don’t even know the difference between a colon and semicolon! Some of them speak so badly that I can’t tell whether they’re dumb or it’s some kind of local speech affectation or impediment." She was known as a "perfectionist" and required students to use "Standard American English pronunciation." She gave direct feedback and would not hide her opinions if she disliked a student’s writing, as shown in Conversations and Class Notes, where she wrote, "Some of your rhymes are simply awful! And you seem to write a lot of free verse out here. I guess that’s what you call it. I was rather appalled." She had little patience for "mood poems," which she called too vague.

Despite this, she gave helpful feedback, as noted in Elizabeth Bishop at Harvard, and encouraged her students to take creative risks.

Later life

In 1971, Bishop started a relationship with Alice Methfessel, who later became responsible for managing Bishop’s writings after her death. Bishop did not write many books, often starting projects but not finishing them. Two years after publishing her final book, Geography III (1977), Bishop passed away from a brain hemorrhage in her apartment at Lewis Wharf, Boston. She is buried in Hope Cemetery in Worcester, Massachusetts. The final two lines from her poem “The Bight” — “All the untidy activity continues, / awful but cheerful” — were placed on her tombstone as she requested. These words were added to the family monument in 1997 during the Elizabeth Bishop Conference and Poetry Festival in Worcester.

After her death, the Elizabeth Bishop House, an artists’ retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia, was created to honor her memory. In 1981, Vassar College Library collected Bishop’s personal letters and manuscripts. Her letters and writings are also found in many other libraries across the United States.

In popular culture

Elizabeth Bishop's work and life experiences inspired and helped create many movies, books, and plays.

The Brazilian film Reaching for the Moon (2013) tells the story of Bishop's life in Brazil with Lota de Macedo Soares. The film's Portuguese title is Flores Raras.

The movies In Her Shoes (2005) and Still Alice (2014) feature Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art."

The one-woman play A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop (2001–2006) was written and performed in Portuguese. It later appeared on Broadway, with Amy Irving as the performer.

Author Michael Sledge wrote the novel The More I Owe You, which is about Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares. The book was published in 2010.

The friendship between Bishop and Robert Lowell was the subject of the play Dear Elizabeth, written by Sarah Ruhl. The play was first performed at the Yale Repertory Theater in 2012. It was based on letters between Bishop and Lowell, which were collected in the book Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

In the television show Breaking Bad, during episode 2.13, "ABQ," Jane's father enters her bedroom and sees a photograph of Elizabeth Bishop on the wall. Earlier, he had told the police that Jane's mother's maiden name was Bishop.