Bishop, Elizabeth | Elizabeth Spires (essay date 1992)
Elizabeth Spires (essay date 1992)
“Elizabeth Bishop: The Things I'd Like to Write,” in The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 62-70.
[In the following essay, Spires recollects her experience in studying Bishop's poetry and discusses Bishop's own feelings about her work.]
Elizabeth Bishop once wrote: “My three ‘favorite’ poets—not the best poets, whom we all admire, but favorite in the sense of one's ‘best friends,’ etc., are Herbert, Hopkins, and Baudelaire.” If I were to name the poets who have been my “best friends” in this same sense, certainly Elizabeth Bishop would have to come first. I did actually meet her once, in Boston in 1978, when I was writing a profile of her for the Vassar Quarterly. Later I edited the six hours of tapes into an interview for The Paris Review.
I had first encountered her poetry in 1970 as a freshman at Vassar. A precise, two-generational span...
[The entire page is 3870 words long]
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