American Literature Web Resources: Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
Created by Julie Rocke, Millikin University

Chronology

February 8, 1911--Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on. She was the only child of William T. Bishop and Gertrude May (Boomer) Bishop, both of Canadian ancestry.

October 13, 1911--Her father, a vice president in his father's Boston-based construction company, died from kidney disease on, when Bishop was only eight months old.

1916--Bishop's mother subsequently suffered a number of breakdowns mother was permanently institutionalized

May 1934-mother died in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Bishop, who was only five years old at the time was then taken by her maternal grandparents to their home in a very 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."

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 many ailments. From her experiences there would come the superb late poem "In the Waiting Room."

May 1918-- Recognizing her unhappiness, in her paternal grandparents allowed her to live with her 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.

1927 to 1930-- attended Walnut Hill School, a boarding institution in Natick, Massachusetts, where she published apprentice writings in The Blue Pencil, the school's literary magazine.

Fall of 1930, Elizabeth Bishop became a freshman at Vassar College in 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

March 1934-- 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.

June 1934-- her college graduation, moved to New York City, determined to make her way as a writer.

1936-- received her first book publication in, 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.

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.

1942-- start of America's involvement in the Second World War, she worked briefly for the United States Navy. 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--She was awarded the Poetry Prize Fellowship, 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. Her carefully wrought poems, which often combined richmand detailed imagery with thematic indirectness, led to favorable reviews by such young poet-critics as Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell.

1947—achieved increasing recognition, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry Prize Fellowship, an appointment as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress in 1949

1950-- award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

1951-- 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.

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 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

1965—published Questions of Travel, her third collection, which contained twenty new poems and the short story "In the Village." as usual, her fellow poets--praised the remarkable craft, brilliant descriptive power, and subtle organization of her work.

1969-- A collected edition of her poetry appeared and she won the National Book Award. As her literary career progressed, Bishop's personal life deteriorated. Her companion Lota, 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.

1966 --she accepted a teaching position--the first of her life--at the University of Washington in Seattle.

1967-- Bishop made an extended visit to New York Lota joined her there, 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.

1976-- Geography III 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.

October 6, 1979-- She died in Boston of a cerebral aneurysm

WORKS BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

An Anthology of Twentieth Century Brazilian Poetry. Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil, eds. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1972.

The Battle of the Burglar of Babylon. NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968.

Brazil. With the editors of LIFE. NY: Time Incorporated, 1962. In the LIFE World Library Series.

"A Brief Reminiscence and a Brief Tribute." Harvard Advocate 108 (1974): 47-48.

"Chimney Sweepers." Vassar Review 19 (Spring 1933): 8-10, 36.

The Collected Prose. NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984.

Complete Poems. NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969.

The Complete Poems, 1927-1979. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983.

"Dimensions for a Novel." Vassar Journal of Undergraduate Studies 8 (May 1934): 95-103.

"Flannery O'Connor, 1925-1964." New York Review of Books 3 (8 October 1964): 21.

Geography III. NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976.

"Gerard Manley Hopkins: Notes on Timing in His Poetry." Vassar Review 23 (February 1934): 5-7.

"An Inadequate Tribute." Randall Jarrell: 1914-1965. Robert Lowell, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren, eds. NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,1967. 20.

"It All Depends." Mid-Century American Poets. John Ciardi, ed. NY: Twayne, 1950. 267.

"'I Was But Just Awake.'" Poetry 93 (October 1958): 50-54. Review of Walter de la Mare, Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages.

"Laureate's Words of Acceptance." World Literature Today 51.1 (Winter 1977): 12.

Letter. Little Magazine 5 (Fall/Winter 1971): 79.

Letter. New Republic 146.18 (30 April 1962): 22.

North & South. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946.

"On the Railroad Named Delight." New York Times Magazine 7 March 1965: 30-31,84-86.

Poems: North & South--A Cold Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955.

Questions of Travel. NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965.

Review of XIAPE: 71 Poems , by e. e. cummings. United States Quarterly Book Review 6 (June 1950): 160-61.

"A Sentimental Tribute." Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin (Spring 1962): 3. Review of The Marianne Moore Reader.

"Time's Andromedas." Vassar Journal of Undergraduate Studies 7 (1933): 102-103.

"Unseemly Deductions." New Republic 127.7 (18 August 1950):20.

"What the Young Man Said to the Psalmist." Poetry 79 (January 1952): 213.