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Elizabeth Bishop |
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From a life of losses, travels, and frequent emotional and physical illnesses, Elizabeth Bishop fashioned a body of poetry remarkable both for the finish of its form and the lushness and precision of its imagery. For many years a specialized taste, her work has grown in reputation in the same patient manner in which she composed poems. In the past decade, her poetry has been the focus of a great deal of attention from both critics and readers, to the point where she is now firmly established as one of the principal poets of the generation that came of age in the shadow of the great modernist masters.
Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 8, 1911. She was the only child of William T. Bishop and Gertrude May (Boomer) Bishop, both of Canadian ancestry. Her father, who was a vice president in his father's Boston-based construction company, had been intermittently ill for several years before his death from kidney disease on October 13, 1911, when his daughter was only eight months old. Bishop's mother subsequently suffered a number of breakdowns, and was permanently institutionalized in 1916; she spent many years in a sanitarium in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, where she died in May 1934. Bishop, who was only five years old at the time of her mother's commitment, never saw her again. She was then taken by her maternal grandparents to their home in a Nova Scotia town called Great Village. Out of her experiences there came the short story "In the Village" and the very fine poem "First Death in Nova Scotia."
In September 1917, her father's parents took her from her largely happy life in Great Village to live with them in their mansion in Worcester, though she would return to Nova Scotia for two months each summer. While living in Worcester, she experienced asthma, eczema, and other ailments. From her experiences there would come the superb late poem "In the Waiting Room." Recognizing her unhappiness, in May 1918 her paternal grandparents allowed her to live with her maternal aunt, Maud Shepherdson, and her husband, George. This, the fourth household in which Elizabeth had lived by the age of eight, proved to be a stable and happy one, and she later credited her aunt with having saved her life. From 1927 to 1930, she attended Walnut Hill School, a boarding institution in Natick, Massachusetts, where she published apprentice writings in The Blue Pencil, the school's literary magazine.
In the fall of 1930, Elizabeth Bishop became a freshman at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she majored in English literature. Her instructors found her to be intelligent, curious, and even charming, but also reserved, proud, and somewhat aloof. Her reserve was partly the product of the abandonments and dislocations of her early years, and was partly of her incipient alcoholism, whose origins she would later trace to her college years. She had several social relationships with young men, and seems not to have come to terms, at this point in her life, with her lesbian orientation (she was a friend of Mary McCarthy's, who was one year ahead of her at Vassar; although some have professed to see Bishop in Lakey, the lesbian character in McCarthy's notorious novel The Group [1963], Bishop herself could find no element of herself in the character). With other students, she founded the Vassar literary magazine Con Spirito, and in her senior year she was editor of the college yearbook. While still an undergraduate, she began to publish her poems and short stories in literary journals with national circulation. In March of 1934, during her last semester at Vassar, she was able, through the college's librarian, to meet the poet Marianne Moore, thus initiating a friendship that would prove decisive for Bishop's life and ambitions. Especially in the next few years, she would rely on Moore for advice and for criticism of her work. After her college graduation in June 1934, she moved to New York City, determined to make her way as a writer.
She received her first book publication in 1936, when a group of her poems, with an introduction by Marianne Moore, appeared in Trial Balances, an anthology that showcased the work of new young writers. But another decade would pass before she published a volume of her own poetry. In the intervening years, she achieved some important publications, including three poems in the first New Directions annual in 1936, a story in Partisan Review in 1938, and a poem in The New Yorker in 1940. In the summer of 1935, she made her first trip to Europe, beginning a love of exotic places that would become a hallmark of both her life and her poetry. Over the next several years, she visited Paris, London, Italy, Spain, and Morocco. In 1937, she discovered Key West, which so charmed her that she settled there in January of the following year. In 1942, at the start of America's involvement in the Second World War, she worked briefly for the United States Navy. In that same year, she visited Mexico, where she met the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and the Mexican painter David Siqueiros. Also in 1942, in New York, she met Lota de Macedo Soares, a young Brazilian woman of aristocratic background, who would become the love of her life.
In 1945, Bishop was invited by an editor at Houghton Mifflin to submit a book-length manuscript for that publisher's first annual Poetry Prize Fellowship. She was awarded the prize, and her book, entitled North & South, appeared the following spring. It contained such early masterpieces as "Roosters" and "The Fish"—which is easily her most popular poem, so much so that she later took to responding to anthologists' solicitations by telling them they could use any of her poems except "The Fish." Its carefully wrought poems, which often combined rich and detailed imagery with thematic indirectness, led to favorable reviews by such discerning young poet-critics as Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell, who would become an especially close friend. On the strength of its success, she achieved increasing recognition, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947, an appointment as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress in 1949, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1950. In November 1951, she made her first visit to South America, which led to her decision to live in Brazil with Lota Soares.
The move to Brazil inaugurated one of the happiest and most settled periods of Bishop's life, and her companion Lota was instrumental in getting her to seek help for—and to achieve some control over—her alcoholism, her asthma, and her chronic depression. Although her writing flourished under these conditions, she was never a prolific poet. In 1955, after her publisher had waited several years for her to produce enough work for a new collection, the decision was made to reissue her previous book together with the poetry she had completed in the intervening decade. This volume, which was titled Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring, received admiring reviews from her peers (relentlessly self-doubting and self-critical, she tended privately to feel more in agreement with the few dissenting notices), and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Yet another decade would pass before the appearance of Questions of Travel (1965), her third collection, which contained twenty new poems and the short story "In the Village." The story was included at the urging of Robert Lowell, who had printed a lengthy autobiographical prose piece in his enormously influential collection Life Studies in 1959. Once again there were dissenters, whose most frequent complaints had to do with supposed decorative effects and trivial choices of subject, but by and large the reviewers—most of them, as usual, her fellow poets—praised the remarkable craft, brilliant descriptive power, and subtle organization of her work. A collected edition of her poetry appeared in 1969, and won the National Book Award.
As her literary career progressed, Bishop's personal life deteriorated. Her companion Lota, who had a complex and demanding position supervising urban development in a section of Rio de Janeiro, became the object of a good deal of adverse criticism, and Bishop herself was attacked in the Rio press as a patronizing and latently racist foreigner. Both women experienced frequent bouts of illness, and Bishop's emotional distress was compounded as her affections were divided between Lota and another woman. Bishop increasingly spent time away from her life in Brazil, and in January 1966 she accepted a teaching position—the first of her life—at the University of Washington in Seattle. In the summer of 1967, Bishop made an extended visit to New York. Lota joined her there on September 19, and, in the middle of the first night of her visit, arose while Bishop was asleep and took an overdose of tranquilizers, which, after a five-day coma, proved fatal. Numbed by feelings of guilt, upset by worsening relations with Lota's family and friends, Bishop spent a year in San Francisco before resuming residence in Brazil.
In the last decade of her life, Bishop traveled in South America and Europe and taught at several universities, establishing a permanent relationship with Harvard, where her writing seminars were attended by several young poets who would later become famous. Geography III (1976), her fourth and last collection, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Its ten poems—among them such major works as "In the Waiting Room," "Crusoe in England," and the heartbreaking "One Art"—showed that, unlike most poets, she had suffered no decline in the quality of her work as she grew older. She died in Boston of a cerebral aneurysm, on October 6, 1979.
Bishop has long been regarded as a "poet's poet"—one, that is, whose appeal, by virtue of her exceptional craft, is largely to her fellow poets. Her best-known poems have remained standard anthology pieces, and a spate of recent studies, a biography, a collection of her letters, and even a book of her paintings demonstrate her high and constantly growing stature with literary scholars and critics. But she has also, in the years since her death, become increasingly popular with a wide audience, as more and more readers discover the slender but solidly satisfying corpus of her work.
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