BISHOP, Elizabeth

Born 8 February 1911, Worcester, Massachusetts; died 6 October 1979, Boston, Massachusetts

Daughter of Gertrude May Bulmer and William Thomas Bishop (the Bulmer family name was pronounced with a silent "l" and had the variant spelling of Boomer)

When Elizabeth Bishop was eight months old, she lost her father to Bright's disease after he had been ill off and on for six years. The death had a disastrous effect on her mother. Unable to cope with the tragedy, her mother became increasingly disoriented and was in and out of mental hospitals during Bishop's early childhood. In 1916 she was permanently institutionalized and never saw her daughter again before she died in 1934.

As an only child growing up, Bishop was continually aware that she did not provide her mother with sufficient consolation or sense of purpose to keep her from leaving yet again. The memory of what seemed to be maternal neglect and rejection stayed with Bishop all her life and surfaced in her poetry, a particularly clear instance being an unpublished draft of a poem called "A Drunkard," where it is associated with the beginnings of her lifelong problem with alcoholism, her "abnormal thirst."

The uncertainty surrounding her mother's condition was mitigated by the stable and loving relationship Bishop had with her maternal grandparents. After being widowed, Bishop's mother had taken her daughter and returned home to live with them in Great Village, Nova Scotia, a tiny and close-knit community filled with relatives and neighbors. When Bishop was six years old, however, the warmth and liveliness of life in Great Village came to an end following the arrival of her father's parents, the prosperous Bishops, whose wealth had been made from a successful contracting firm noted for building such landmarks as the Boston Public Library and Museum of Fine Arts. The Bishops were intent on taking their granddaughter back with them, and so she was returned, against her will, to her birthplace in Worcester, Massachusetts.

The contrast between the cold and proper opulence of the Bishop home and her country existence in Nova Scotia could not have been greater. The sudden isolation and boredom were terrible experiences for a sensitive child who had already suffered more than her share of misfortune. She became ill with a number of severe ailments including bronchitis, asthma, and eczema, all of which plagued her for the rest of her life. Her miserable stay with the Bishops lasted only nine months, but it represented a profound turning point. Her famous poem "In the Waiting Room" recalls it as a fall from innocence into a painfully acute and alienating consciousness of time and self.

Her health became so poor that the Bishops allowed her to be rescued by her aunt, Maud Bulmer Shepherdson, her mother's older sister. In 1918 Bishop moved to Revere, Massachusetts, to live with Maud and her husband. Although she loved her aunt and was deeply grateful for her generosity, she continued to suffer from the sense of having no rightful place or home of her own. During an interview with Elizabeth Spires in 1978 (published in Paris Review, Summer 1981), Bishop said, "…my relationship with my relatives—I was always a sort of guest, and I think I've always felt like that."

Before the age of fourteen Bishop had little formal education, but with the help of her aunt she developed her literary interests through independent reading. At fourteen she began attending high school and day school, and from 1927 to 1930 she went to Walnut Hill, a college prep boarding school in Natick, Massachusetts. In 1930 she entered Vassar College and became part of a group of gifted students that included Mary McCarthy, Eleanor Clark, and Muriel Rukeyser. During her senior year, she was introduced to poet Marianne Moore, who was forty-seven at the time. Moore befriended the young Bishop, and their relationship—as mentor and apprentice initially and then as colleagues—lasted through the years, despite the many travels and changes of residence that characterized Bishop's nomadic life.

A second key friendship with a fellow poet took shape when Bishop met Robert Lowell in 1947. As two up-and-coming writers, they established a relationship of peers. Both had just published highly acclaimed collections—North & South (1946) for Bishop and Lord Weary's Castle for Lowell—and they sensed in each other a kinship that would develop into a mutually sustaining exchange of ideas, drafts, and advice.

In 1951 Bishop embarked on a trip around South America. During a stop in Rio de Janeiro, she suffered a violent allergic reaction to the fruit of the cashew tree and had to abandon her plans and recover there. She was cared for by the friends she had been visiting, and with one of them, Lota Costellat de Macedos Soares, the friendship deepened into an intimate relationship. She ended up living with Soares in Brazil for 15 years. For much of that period she led a settled and happy existence, combining domesticity with creative production.

Bishop's second collection of poems was published with a reissuance of her first collection, and the combined volume, Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring (1955), won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956. Her third collection, Questions of Travel (1965), was followed by The Complete Poems (1969), which received the National Book award in 1970.

After the tragic death of Soares in 1967, apparently by suicide, Bishop made arrangements to take up residence in the U.S. and spent the final decade of her life writing and teaching, primarily at Harvard University. In 1976 she became the first American and the first woman to receive the Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature. That same year saw the publication of the final collection to appear in her lifetime, Geography III, which won the National Book Critics Circle award in 1977. After her death in 1979, Bishop's reputation continued to grow and she has come to be considered one of the preeminent poets of the 20th century.

Other Works:

Brazil (with the editors of Life, 1962). The Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon (1968). The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (1983). The Collected Prose (1984). One Art: Elizabeth Bishop (letters edited by Robert Giroux, 1994).

Bibliography:

Brown, A., "An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop," in Shenandoah 17 (Winter 1966). CANR 61 (1998). CLC 32 (1985). DLB 5 (1980), 169 (1996). Goldensohn, L., Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poet (1991). Kalstone, D., Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (1989). Millier, B. C., Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (1993); "The Prodigal: Elizabeth Bishop and Alcohol," in Contemporary Literature 39 (Spring 1998). Paton, P. M., "Landscape and Female Desire: Elizabeth Bishop's 'Closet' Tactics," in Mosaic 31 (Sept. 1998). Showalter, E., ed., Modern American Women Writers (1991).

—MARLENE M. MILLER