Where some of her notable contemporaries like Robert Lowell and John Berryman made the intimate details of their personal lives an important part of their poetry, Bishop avoided this practice altogether.[27] In contrast to this confessional style involving large amounts of self-exposure, Bishop's style of writing, though it did include a small amount of material from her personal life, was known for its highly detailed, objective, and distant point of view, and for its reticence on the kinds of personal subject matter that the work of her contemporaries involved. She used discretion when writing about details and people from her life. "In the Village", a piece about her childhood and her mentally unstable mother, is written as a third-person narrative; the reader would only know of the story's autobiographical origins by knowing about Bishop's childhood.[28]
Bishop did not see herself as a "lesbian poet" or as a "female poet". Because she refused to have her work published in all-female poetry anthologies, other female poets involved with the women's movement thought she was hostile towards the movement. For instance, a student at Harvard who was close to Bishop in the 60s, Kathleen Spivack, wrote in her memoir,
I think Bishop internalized the misogyny of the time. How could she not? ... Bishop had a very ambivalent relation to being a woman plus poet—plus lesbian—in the Boston/Cambridge/Harvard nexus ... Extremely vulnerable, sensitive, she hid much of her private life. She wanted nothing to do with anything that seemed to involve the women's movement. She internalized many of the male attitudes of the day toward women, who were supposed to be attractive, appealing to men, and not ask for equal pay or a job with benefits.[29]
However, this was not necessarily how Bishop viewed herself. In an interview with The Paris Review from 1978, she said that, despite her insistence on being excluded from female poetry anthologies, she still considered herself to be "a strong feminist" but that she only wanted to be judged based on the quality of her writing and not on her gender or sexual orientation.[4][30]
Although generally supportive of the "confessional" style of her friend, Robert Lowell, she drew the line at his highly controversial book The Dolphin (1973), in which he used and altered private letters from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick (whom he divorced after 23 years of marriage), as material for his poems. In a letter to Lowell, dated March 21, 1972, Bishop strongly urged him against publishing the book: "One can use one's life as material [for poems]—one does anyway—but these letters—aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn't changed them... etc. But art just isn't worth that much."[31]
"In the Waiting Room"
Bishop's "In the Waiting Room", written in 1976, addressed the chase for identity and individuality within a diverse society as a seven-year-old girl living in Worcester, Massachusetts, during World War I.
"First Death in Nova Scotia"
Bishop's poem "First Death in Nova Scotia", first published in 1965, describes her first encounter with death when her cousin Arthur died. In this poem, her experience of that event is through a child's point of view. The poem highlights that although young and naive the child has some instinctive awareness of the severe impact of death. She combines reality and imagination, a technique also used in her poem "Sestina".[32]
"Sestina"
Bishop's poem "Sestina", published in 1956 in The New Yorker, depicts a real-life experience. After her father's death when she was a baby and following her mother's nervous breakdown when she was five, Bishop's poem notes her experience after she has gone to live with relatives. The poem is about her living with the knowledge that she would not see her mother again. Bishop writes, "Time to plant tears, says the almanac. / The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove / and the child draws another inscrutable house."[33] The style of her poem, the sestina, is a poetry style created by Arnaut Daniel in the 12th century, focused on the emphases of ending words in each line, giving the poem a sense of form and pattern. Bishop is widely known for her skill in the sestina format.[34]
