Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop 1911-79, American poet, b. Worcester, Mass., grad. Vassar, 1934. During the 1950s and 60s she lived in Brazil, eventually returning to her native New England, where she taught at Harvard (1970-77). Her first volume of poetry, North and South (1946), was reprinted with additions as North and South—A Cold Spring (1955; Pulitzer Prize). Her poetic vision is penetrating and detached; her style is subtle yet conversational. Without straining for novelty, she finds symbolic significance in objects and events quietly observed and scrupulously described. Among her other works are her Complete Poems (1979), The Collected Prose (1984), Geography III (1985); several travel books, notably Questions of Travel (1965) and Brazil (1967); and the posthumously published Edger Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments (2006). With Emanuel Brasil she edited An Anthology of Twentieth Century Brazilian Poetry (1972) and she also translated the works of several Brazilian poets.

Bibliography: See her One Art: Letters, selected correspondence ed. by R. Giroux (1994); biographies by A. Stevenson (1966), B. C. Millier (1993), and G. Fountain and P. Brazeau (1994); C. L. Oliveira, Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares (2002); studies by R. D. Parker (1988), T. J. Tavisano (1988), B. Costello (1991), L. Goldensohn (1992), C. Doreski (1993), S. McCabe (1994), M. M. Lombardi (1995), A. Colwell (1997), A. Stevenson (1998), and X. Zhou (1999).

Bishop, Elizabeth (1911–79), American poet, born in Massachusetts, educated at Vassar, where she met Marianne Moore, with whose work her own has much affinity. The titles of some of her volumes (North and South, 1946; Questions of Travel, 1965; Geography III, 1976) reflect her preoccupation with place and movement, and her verse is reticent, objective, spare yet colloquial. Her Complete Poems 1927–1979 appeared in 1983.