Bishop, Elizabeth (Vol. 32) - Introduction

Elizabeth Bishop 1911–1979

American poet, short story writer, editor, and translator.

Bishop's reputation as an accomplished poet rests on a small but significant body of highly crafted verse. Describing nature and experience with meticulous detail, Bishop often employed unusual metaphors and surreal images to portray an unsettling world. Critics frequently compare Bishop's subtle wit and close attention to detail to that of her friend and mentor, Marianne Moore. Bishop received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Poems: North & South; A Cold Spring (1955), the National Book Award for The Complete Poems (1969), and the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Geography III (1976). In addition, in 1976 Bishop became the first American to receive the Neustadt International Prize for literature.

Due to her father's death and her mother's nervous breakdown, Bishop spent her childhood with relatives in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts. After graduating from Vassar College in 1934, she traveled extensively in Europe and North Africa before settling in Key West, Florida. In 1951 she moved to Brazil, where she resided for fifteen years before returning to the United States to teach at Harvard University. Not only have these experiences imbued Bishop's poetry with varied settings and imagery, but travel is a central metaphor in her work, often symbolizing the search for self. In Bishop's poetry, dislocation, loneliness, and constant doubt are associated with such a search, but an acceptance of hardship prevails. In the title poem of her collection Questions of Travel (1965) Bishop wonders whether or not it was wise to leave the stability and familiarity of home to travel abroad. The poem implies that without continual risk and uncertainty there can be no spiritual growth. The importance of self-discovery is also emphasized in many of the poems in Geography III (1976). The most famous of these, "In the Waiting Room," concerns young Elizabeth's sudden awareness of both the division and connection between herself and the world.

The nature of reality is a prominent theme of the poems in Poems: North & South; A Cold Spring. In "The Map" a land map is used to symbolize the difference between objective reality and reproductions of it. The poem suggests that because works of art are slanted by the creator's subjective perceptions, they are as much guides to that individual's imagination as to the objects or ideas being imitated. Similarly, in "At the Fishhouses" and "Cape Breton" Bishop expresses the elusiveness of ultimate reality.

Bishop is considered a master of descriptive verse. Her calm, understated tone and the ease with which she gradually shifts from observations of ordinary objects to philosophical insights are also highly regarded. In his poem "For Elizabeth Bishop 4" Robert Lowell refers to Bishop as an "unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect." Although her poetry is often personal, critics note that Bishop avoids self-pity and egoism and extends her themes from the specific to the universal. Bishop's works of fiction, which are fewer than her works of poetry, have been praised for similar qualities; critic and poet D. J. Enright remarks that "like her poetry, Elizabeth Bishop's

Elizabeth Bishop 1911–1979
Elizabeth Bishop 1911–1979 © Thomas Victor 1984
prose is precise, cool, unexcited, flat, with never a trace of pointing up."

Published posthumously, both The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 (1983) and The Collected Prose (1984) have elicited retrospective analyses of her works and have reinforced the widespread critical opinion that Bishop's opus is an important contribution to recent twentieth-century literature.

(See also CLC, Vols. 1, 4, 9, 13, 15; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed., Vols. 89-92 [obituary]; Something about the Author, Vol. 24; and Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 5.)