Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop (born Feb. 8, 1911, Worcester, Mass., U.S.—died Oct. 6, 1979, Boston, Mass.) was an American poet known for her polished, witty, descriptive verse. Her short stories and her poetry first were published in The New Yorker and other magazines.

Bishop was reared by her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia and by an aunt in Boston. After graduating from Vassar College in 1934, she traveled abroad often, living for a time in Key West, Florida (1938–42), and Mexico (1943). She was consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress (now poet laureate consultant in poetry) from 1949 to 1950. During most of the 1950s and ’60s she lived with Lota de Macedo Soares in Petrópolis, Braz., near Rio de Janeiro, later dividing the year between Petrópolis and San Francisco. Her first book of poems, North & South (1946), captures the divided nature of Bishop’s allegiances: born in New England and reared there and in Nova Scotia, she eventually migrated to hotter regions. This book was reprinted in 1955, with additions, as North & South: A Cold Spring, and it won a Pulitzer Prize.

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Much of Bishop’s later work also addresses the frigid-tropical dichotomy of a New England conscience in a tropical sphere. Questions of Travel (1965) and Geography III (1976) offer spare, powerful meditations on the need for self-exploration, on the value of art (especially poetry) in human life, and on human responsibility in a chaotic world. The latter collection includes some of Bishop’s best-known poems, among them “In the Waiting Room,” “Crusoe in England,” and the exquisite villanelle “One Art.” A collection entitled The Complete Poems was published in 1969.

Bishop taught writing at Harvard University from 1970 to 1977, and she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1976. Her posthumously published poetry collections include The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (1983) and Edgar Allen Poe & the Juke-Box (2006), the latter of which contains previously unpublished material. The Collected Prose, a volume of fiction and nonfiction, appeared in 1984. A selection of her letters was published under the title One Art in 1994. Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (2008) is a comprehensive collection of her published and unpublished work.

Bishop also wrote a travel book, Brazil (1962), and translated from the Portuguese Alice Brant’s Brazilian classic, The Diary of Helena Morley (1957). She edited and translated An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (1972). Bishop also was an artist, and Exchanging Hats (1996) is a collection of more than 50 of her paintings.