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38 ELIZABETH BISHOP 1911–1979 Elizabeth bishop has emerged as one of the most important and widely discussed American poets of the twentieth century. Bishop published comparatively little in her lifetime, and our image of her as a writer and as a person has undergone continuous revision since her death. This revision results from the publication of additional poems, prose writings and letters but also from the intense critical activity her work has generated, which has revealed the deeply yet subtly self-exploratory nature of a body of work that once was widely considered to be precisely observed but coolly impersonal. During Bishop’s lifetime, she tended to be pegged as a shy and almost reclusive figure—an adept minor poet who pursued a curiously isolated career, disconnected from the major currents of contemporary history, culture, and thought. But Bishop is now being widely and more acutely read as a poet of audacious and masterly skills and of considerable emotional power—and as a poet who was crucially engaged with such vital cultural and political issues as gender, sexuality, social marginality, national identity, class, war, the environment, power relations, and family intimacy and conflict. Bishop is also recognized as a deeply influential poet and as a cultural figure who was engaged in significant dialogue with an extraordinary spectrum of important writers, artists, and composers of many nations. She had considerable roots not only in New England but also in Canada and Brazil, and she is now often studied as a poet of the border-grounds, a cosmopolitan poet, and a transnational prose writer and correspondent. Her global importance and her influence over younger poets appear to be continually expanding. Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1911. Her father, Thomas Bishop, a prosperous building contractor, died eight months later of the stillincurable Bright’s disease. Bishop’s mother, Gertrude Bulmer Bishop, never recovered from the loss. Instead, she suffered a series of mental breakdowns. Following her return to her native Great Village, Nova Scotia, with her child in 1915, Gertrude experienced a major breakdown and was permanently institutionalized the following year, when the poet was five. After her mother’s collapse , Bishop was passed around among various maternal and paternal relatives in both the United States and Canada. During this formative time she suffered from severe autoimmune disorders—chiefly asthma and eczema—which nearly killed her when she was six and which prevented her from taking part in formal schooling until 1926, when she was fifteen years old. Bishop wrote extensively and with understated wit, beauty, and poignancy about her childhood. Indeed, these early experiences haunted her with feelings of homelessness and loss and 39 Elizabeth Bishop Ø confirmed her as a lifelong reader and traveler. They also gave her a multinational perspective, while conditioning her to observe the world, in Adrienne Rich’s phrase, with “the eye of the outsider.” When her health permitted her to return to formal studies, attending North Shore Country Day School and then Walnut Hill School from 1926 to 1930, she published a brilliant series of essays, reviews, stories, and poems in her school magazines. Supported by a trust fund from her late father, she attended Vassar College from 1930 to 1934 and continued to produce remarkable work in college publications while forming friendships with classmates such as Mary McCarthy , Louise Crane, and Eleanor Clark. In 1934, Bishop met the poet Marianne Moore, who became her mentor. Following college graduation, Bishop traveled extensively in Europe, North Africa, and Florida. From 1938, Bishop settled for part of each year in Key West while maintaining an apartment in New York City. Bishop thus established the geographical poles that would be articulated in the title of her first book, North & South (1946), and that would recur throughout her later work. A surrealistic dream landscape of New York, typical of her earliest mature work, appears in “The Man-Moth,” while the southern pole is represented in such Florida-centered poems as “The Fish.” In 1947, Bishop met Robert Lowell (who also appears in this anthology). Lowell soon became her favorite poet and closest friend. The extensive body of letters they exchanged over the next thirty years, exploring all aspects of their lives and art, has been published as Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. In just his second letter to her, Lowell praised the recently published “At the Fishhouses,” confessing that “I felt very envious reading it—I...

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