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Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

http://www.poets.org/lit/POET/ebishop.htm

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Elizabeth Bishop including a biography, audio files, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and external links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bishop/bishop.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links about Elizabeth Bishop.

BIOGRAPHY

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911, and her father passed away before her first birthday. By the time she turned five, her mother had suffered a series of breakdowns and become institutionalized for mental illness. As a result, Bishop was raised by her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, later moving to Worcester at the age of six to live with her father's family. At age sixteen, Bishop enrolled at Walnut Hill boarding school, later followed by her undergraduate studies at Vassar College. The poems she wrote while at Vassar drew the notice of the modernist poet Marianne Moore who became an important mentor and Bishop's lifelong friend. Elizabeth Bishop was a cosmopolitan citizen of the world and traveled widely in France, Mexico, and Key West. For fifteen years she lived in Brazil with her longtime companion Lota de Macedo Soares. This broad, international experience is reflected in such volumes as North and South (1946), A Cold Spring (1955), Questions of Travel (1965) and Geography III (1976), all of which are compiled in The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (1983). Bishop had a pronounced influence on a number of her contemporaries including Robert Lowell who dedicated his widely read poem "Skunk Hour" to Bishop. Following the suicide of Lota de Macedo Soares, Bishop left Brazil and took up a teaching position at the University of Washington in 1966 and then at Harvard College from 1969 through 1977 when she retired two years before her death in 1979. Among her numerous awards and honors, were the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Colwell, Anne. Inscrutable Houses: Metaphors of the Body in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, 1997.

Lombardi, Marilyn May. The Body and the Song: Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 1995.

McCabe, Susan. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss. University Park, Pa. : Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.

Roman, Camille. Elizabeth Bishop's World War II—Cold War View. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Shigley, Sally Bishop. Dazzling Dialectics: Elizabeth Bishop's Resonating Feminist Reality. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.

Stevenson, Anne. Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop. London : Bellew, 1998.

Zhou, Xiaojing. Elizabeth Bishop: Rebel in Shades and Shadows. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER