Elizabeth Bishop is one of the most widely read American poets of the twentieth century. In the decades following her death, her reputation among critics and popularity among readers have increased exponentially. Her lyric poems are marked by a knowing, observant tone and technical virtuosity, even while exploring themes as diverse as grief, alienation, and the intersection of the natural and human worlds. Her collections include the 1946 North and South, the Pulitzer-Prize winning 1955 Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring, and the 1976 Geography III. Of the 101 poems Bishop published during her life, some of the most widely anthologized and beloved are "One Art," published in 1976, "The Fish," published in 1946, and "In the Waiting Room," published in 1976.
Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her childhood was tumultuous: her father died when Bishop was a year old, and her mother was committed to an asylum following a mental health crisis when Bishop was five. She then went to live with her grandparents in Nova Scotia. She spent her childhood between Nova Scotia, Worcester, and Boston, raised at various points by relatives on both her maternal and paternal side. She attended Vassar College, where she became part of a well-known literary circle. Her peers at Vassar, with whom she co-founded the literary magazine Con Spirito, included the poet Marianne Moore—with whom Bishop would remain close throughout her life—and the novelist Mary McCarthy. (Bishop later cultivated a well-known friendship with the poet Robert Lowell as well). She graduated from Vassar in 1934 and embarked on a series of travels in Europe and North Africa.
While Bishop's early travels in Europe and Africa informed her poetry, she produced much of the work that would eventually be published in her first collection while living in Key West, Florida. After four years in Key West, Bishop moved to Brazil with her partner, the architect Lota de Macedo Soares. While in Brazil, she became interested in the country's literary tradition, eventually translating poetry from Portuguese into English. She also developed a fraught relationship with the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, and even produced several English translations of Lispector's work. She spent 14 years in Brazil, but, following Soares's 1967 death, she increasingly spent time back in the U.S. The later years of her career were marked by accolades, including a National Book Award and a Neustadt International Prize for Literature. During the final decade of her life, Bishop taught at Harvard University, and she died in Boston in 1979. In addition to poetry, Bishop worked as a painter, even remarking in an interview with The Paris Review, "I like painting probably better than I like poetry."
Bishop's poetry is known for its tranquil, measured, and detailed observations about the natural world. She is known for focusing on the everyday settings of domesticity and work. Her poems feature scenes drawn both from her travels and from her life in New England. These poems tend not to focus on overt biography or confessional revelations, instead addressing their subjects from an impersonal but engaged distance. The poet and critic Ernest Hilbert has written that Bishop's work is "distinguished by tranquil observation, craft-like accuracy, care for the small things of the world, a miniaturist’s discretion and attention."
Born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Elizabeth Bishop grew up with her relatives. Her father died early in her childhood, and her mother suffered from a stroke. She began her writing career with the money she inherited. The poem is written in...
Elizabeth Bishop was born to become a poet. Like so many of the greatest names in American poetry, Bishop is a New Englander who came into the world in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911. Almost immediately commenced a series of events of that would...
One of the most respected American writers of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Bishop (1911 – 1979) is predominantly known as a poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for her poetry collection Cold Springs, and the National Book Award in 1970...
The Fish is one of the most celebrated poems by Elizabeth Bishop. She is renowned for the insightfulness of her poems. She described her relationship with his lover through the imagery of fish. She portrayed the fish as a helpless one and makes...
"In the Waiting Room" was written in 1976, therefore not long before the poet's death. It presents an autobiographical character, a young girl called Elizabeth who is waiting for her aunt to finish her dentist appointment. "In the Waiting Room" is...
Elizabeth Bishop wrote Man-Moth when she was really young at twenty-four years of age, just after she finished college in year 1935. The poet had a difficult life, losing both of her parents at an early age, and the sense of loss and isolation is...
“The Monument” is a poem by Elizabeth Bishop originally published in 1939 and then collected in her first book of poetry, North and South, in 1946. The poem is an example of what is known as ekphrastic verse which is just fancy literary...
Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" is a part-autobiographical poem reflecting on the losses that the poet encountered throughout her lifetime. The nineteen-line poem is written in villanelle form and is divided into six stanzas. The poet considers the...
