BISHOP, Elizabeth

(b. 8 February 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts; d. 6 October 1979 in Cambridge, Massachusetts), prize-winning poet, translator, and fiction writer whose small body of verse during the 1960s perfected the intimate, observant voice of her earlier work and certified her place among the great American poets of the twentieth century.

Bishop was the only child of William Thomas Bishop and Gertrude May Bulmer. Though born in Massachusetts, she joined her maternal grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia, a few years after her father's unexpected death and her mother's precipitous mental decline. Bishop delighted in Nova Scotia's rural atmosphere, which provided a setting for several of her most famous poems, but her father's wealthy parents eventually removed their granddaughter to the more "proper" environs of Worcester. The resulting sense of loss and homelessness became a central theme in her writings and contributed to the depression, asthma, and alcoholism that troubled Bishop much of her life.

While a senior at Vassar College in 1934, Bishop befriended the poet Marianne Moore, who became a model for the young poet and encouraged her to pursue a life of writing. By nature shy and careful, Bishop showed similar qualities as a writer, revising drafts endlessly and never rushing to publish, though her work was soon appearing in The New Yorker and The Partisan Review. During the 1940s, she began summering in New York City and wintering in Key West, Florida, a pattern her first two books of poetry, North & South (which won the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Award for 1946), and North & South—A Cold Spring (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955), reflected in the varied geographies and carefully detailed landscapes of those two parts of the United States.

In 1951, anxious to escape New York's competitive atmosphere and disappointed after a planned trip to Italy to visit friend and fellow poet Robert Lowell fell through, Bishop sailed for South America on a round-the-world cruise. In Pétropolis, Brazil, while visiting the aristocrat Lota de Macedo Soares, she suffered a violent allergic reaction to the local cashew fruit. Soares's care of Bishop during her protracted illness sparked a romantic relationship that would continue for fifteen years.

Life in Brazil proved an anodyne for the ever-wandering Bishop. By 1953, she had settled happily into Soares's rural estate, with its panoply of adoptive children and animals, and felt at ease with her lesbian identity as she never had in the United States. Although removed from the social changes taking place back home, she kept abreast of developments in poetry, but the trend toward free verse and confessionalism conflicted with her more classical sensibilities. Her experience of the Brazilian landscape and culture during the late 1950s and early 1960s helped Bishop compose the poems that would form her third book, Questions of Travel (1965). Dividing the book into two sections, "Brazil" and "Elsewhere," she seemed to suggest that her new home, so unlike her childhood Nova Scotia and New England, had provided the grounding Bishop needed to explore regions of memory that proximity had denied her.

Bishop's characteristic eye for detail and her preference for questions rather than answers in her poetry thrived on her experience of Brazil. In the poem "Questions of Travel," she asked of her lifelong wanderings, "What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life / in our bodies, we are determined to rush / to see the sun the other way around? / The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?" The second half of the volume explores autobiographical elements the poet's earlier work avoided. "Sestina" recalls a moment with Bishop's maternal grandmother that entwines domestic comfort and sadness, presumably at the absence of a daughter/mother). Characteristically linking the familiar and the strange to achieve emotional resonance, Bishop described her grandmother's teacup as "full of dark brown tears."

Although her emphasis on controlled syntax and tone made Bishop's poetry seem conservative in comparison to other poetry of the 1960s, the book Questions of Travel demonstrated a new richness of diction, an increasing wonder at encounters with the natural world, and a comfort with direct statement that would influence such varied poets as John Ashbery (an experimentalist), James Merrill (a formalist), and Adrienne Rich (a feminist poet).

In 1961 Bishop's stable life began unraveling after Soares accepted a government position in Rio de Janeiro, overseeing the construction of Flamingo Park. At first, Bishop and Soares were excited by the prospect of relocating to the city. But Bishop's dealings with Time–Life Books, for whom she was writing a guide to Brazil (published in 1962), became an increasing source of frustration, and Rio's busy environs, as well as a military coup in 1964, contrasted harshly with their tranquil country life.

Bishop began to drink heavily, and though she tried writing poems and translations from the short stories of Clarice Lispector, which allegorize the experience of being a woman in a man's world, things soon fell apart. Returning to Brazil after a one-year teaching appointment at the University of Washington in 1966, where she had begun an affair with a younger woman named Suzanne Bowen, Bishop found Soares jealous and distraught. In spite of efforts at reconciliation, the two women grew further apart, and in 1967, after joining Bishop on a visit to New York City, Soares overdosed on sedatives and died a few days later.

Inconsolable, Bishop sought refuge in Bowen, who took her to San Francisco in 1968. There Bishop met such poets as Thom Gunn and Robert Duncan, and even interviewed the wife of Eldridge Cleaver, but she found the changed social mores troubling to her sense of decorum. Soon after, the two women moved into an eighteenth-century country house in the Brazilian village of Ouro Prêto. However, Bishop would never regain the peace and ease she had enjoyed with Soares, and in 1970 she and Bowen separated. Their parting, however, freed Bishop to complete her first original poems in three years, including the famous "In the Waiting Room," a reflection on the poet's girlhood awakening to the fact of her own identity.

In 1970 Bishop's Collected Poems received a National Book Award, and Robert Lowell offered Bishop his teaching post at Harvard while he spent a year abroad. She accepted and later chose to remain in Boston. While there, she completed a small volume of poems that would become her most critically acclaimed book, Geography III (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976), in which her characteristic gentle humor and clarity of vision were shown to have survived a lifetime of upheaval and loss. Bishop died of an embolism, and is buried in the Bishop family plot in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Though physically and politically removed from the United States for much of the 1960s, Bishop composed during this time a body of poetry that not only received the accolades of contemporaries, but greatly influenced American poetry for the remainder of the century. An easy blending of precise sensory detail, lively phrasing, and complex prosody resulted in poems that allowed Bishop to consider such personal issues as her own alcoholism, sense of homelessness, and lesbian identity, without succumbing to the confessionalism that dominated the 1960s. For a time the accolade "a poet's poet" distanced Bishop from other poets of the 1960s, but her poetry continues to demonstrate a capacity for both addressing and transcending the issues of its day.

Autobiographical works about Bishop include her own selected letters, One Art (1994). Biographical works include David Kalstone, Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (1989); Brett C. Miller, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (1993); and Gary Fountain, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography (1994).

Temple Cone