Treasured for spare elegance, imagery, and precise language, Elizabeth Bishop revealed her thoughts to readers through regular poetry submissions to The New Yorker magazine. She was skilled at dreamy fantasy and detachment as well as solid description, and she filled her work with the places and emotional states that marked a life much influenced by nomadic travel, lesbianism, depression, and alcohol. In addition to poetry collections, she produced a musical score, juvenile verse, and translations of the poems of Octavio Paz. She also introduced the English-speaking world to Brazilian poetry.
Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts. The instability of her childhood derived from the death of her father from kidney failure when she was eight months old and the permanent committal of her mother to an asylum five years later. From that point on, Bishop never saw her mother again. Deprived of interaction with her peers, she grew up among adult relatives.
Placed with maternal grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia, Bishop attended a one-room school at age six. Her elementary education was sporadic because of frequent attacks of asthma, bronchitis, and eczema. She then returned to Worcester and lived with an aunt while attending two Massachusetts boarding schools: North Shore Country Day School in Swampscott and Walnut Hill School in Nantick. At both schools, she published in student newspapers and composed poems and skits for class performance.
While attending Vassar, ostensibly to study piano, Bishop read Henry James and Joseph Conrad and discovered American poets H. D., Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. She regretted that she did not study more Greek and Roman poets, whom she considered sources of mastery. When the editors of The Vassar Miscellany rejected a submission of modern verse, she joined with classmates Mary McCarthy, Eleanor Clark, and Muriel Rukeyser in founding a less conventional literary journal, Con Spirito. With the aid of the college librarian, in 1934, Bishop established a friendship with mentor Marianne Moore that lasted until Moore’s death in 1972. After graduating, Bishop produced evocative verse while living on an inherited income. Moore published a few of Bishop’s poems in 1935 in Trial Balances, a collection of the works of beginning poets.
Bishop spent the next three years in Europe and North Africa, then settled in Key West, Florida, where the vigor of storms at sea and fishing trips empowered her verse. She then moved to Mexico. Her work appeared in Partisan Review and, in 1945, she won a $1,000 Houghton Mifflin Poetry Fellowship. In the late 1940s, friendships with Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell sparked a new literary direction. From 1949 to 1950, she served the Library of Congress as poetry consultant, a prolific period that earned her the American Academy of Arts and Letters award and a Houghton Mifflin honor for North and South (1946).
In 1951, after a bout of gastitis sidelined her from a South-American cruise, Bishop remained behind in Brazil, where she established a satisfying relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares. She earned critical acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize for poetry for a collection set in Nova Scotia, A Cold Spring (1955). In her Brazilian period, she translated Alice Brant’s The Diary of “Helena Morley” (1957) and composed Brazil (1962), an overedited volume stressing the struggle of South America under entrenched patriarchy. She followed with a National Book Award-winner, Questions of Travel (1965).
After the death of her mate in 1967, Bishop returned to the United States and wrote a volume of children’s verse, The Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon (1968). In 1969, she began a satisfying teaching career as Harvard’s poet-in-residence. During this period, she issued Complete Poems (1969), edited An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (1972), and published Geography III (1976), which earned her an election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics’ Circle award. Bishop died of a cerebral aneurysm in Boston on October 6, 1979. Posthumous works include The Complete Poems (1983) and The Collected Prose (1984).
