Elizabeth Bishop: Poems Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop never considered herself a believer. “I dislike the didacticism, not to say condescension, of the practicing Christians I know,”[1] she wrote to her biographer Anne Stevenson in 1964. However, her poems suggest that her aversion...

The Oxford English Diction defines ekphrasis as “a literary device in which a painting, sculpture, or other work of visual art is described in detail” (1). While this definition suggests ekphrastic writing to concern man-made works of art...

In Filling Station, Elizabeth Bishop presents her readers with an image of urban life that at first seems filthy and repulsive; however, through subtle manipulation of techniques including tone change, connotation and structural shift, she...

There are a variety of different methods in which to express oneself artistically. Some of the most eminent are through fiction writing and painting, however, one of the most historically sensitive and perceptive means of expression is through...

Elizabeth Bishop

Pink Dog

(Rio de Janeiro)

The sun is blazing and the sky is blue.

Umbrellas clothe the beach in every hue.

Naked, you trot across the avenue.

Oh, never have I seen a dog so bare!

Naked and pink, without a single hair...

Startled,...

In her affectionate verse “The Shampoo”, Elizabeth Bishop addresses her lesbian partner Lota, whose great black tresses have begun to bear the signs of grey aging. Her tone is tender and her language contemplative—she marvels at the marks of age...

Elizabeth Bishop has often been linked to the poetical canon of the ‘confessional poets’ of the 1960’s and 70’s. Confessional poetry focused largely on the poet, exposing his/her insecurities and personal vulnerabilities. Bishop, however, was...

In his essay “Action and Repose—Gerard Manley Hopkins’s influence in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop,” Ben Howard notes the strong influence Hopkins had on poems like “The Prodigal” and “The Fish,” by Elizabeth Bishop. Another one of Bishop’s poems...

It is no secret that Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop were close friends. Although written decades apart, poems titled “The Fish” were created by both authors. Upon reading Bishop’s poem against Moore’s, we can see that both of the poems deal...

There are many things that children do not understand. Their lack of experience makes them ignorant to what is happening around them, and even oblivious to the presence of death. When someone a child knows dies, it is a really rough transition:...

In “Cape Breton,” Elizabeth Bishop describes a landscape for the rigid cliffs and water that compose it, but also for its representation on a grander scale. The landscape is a representation of the peaceful world and how it is inevitably...

Nature often horrifies and frightens us. Whether it is a snake that has the potential to kill with one bite or a raging flood that can destroy an entire town in a matter of minutes, the natural world often causes us to cower in sight of its...

In The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer argues that contemporary science, while evolving from magical and religious attempts to understand and control the natural world, eclipses these frameworks[1]. To Frazer “magic” in the 20th century “is...

Elizabeth Bishop ends her famous poem “One Art” with the lines, “It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like… disaster.” Although “One Art” lists many literal and symbolic forms of loss, the one that becomes...

In their poems “At the Fishhouses” and “For the Union Dead”, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell respectively examine the landscapes of their childhoods as a means of determining what is lost in mankind’s strives towards modernity and what...

Elizabeth Bishop ends her famous poem “One Art” with the lines, “It’s evident the art of losing isn't too hard to master / though it may look like… disaster.” Although “One Art” lists many literal and symbolic forms of loss, the one that becomes...

The works of Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath are often presented in stark, binary contrast to each other – Bishop as a generally reserved, often cryptic observer of the natural world and Plath as a brutally expressive, easily legible vessel of...