Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop (born February 8, 1911, Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S.—died October 6, 1979, Boston, Massachusetts) was an American poet known for her polished, witty, descriptive verse. Her short stories and her poetry first were published in The New Yorker and other magazines. Since her death in 1979, her reputation has grown as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century.

Background

Bishop was reared by her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia and by an aunt in Boston. After graduating from Vassar College in 1934, she traveled abroad often, living for a time in Key West, Florida (1938–42), and Mexico (1943). She was consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress (now U.S. poet laureate) from 1949 to 1950. During most of the 1950s and ’60s she lived with the architect Lota de Macedo Soares in Petrópolis, Brazil, near Rio de Janeiro, later dividing the year between Petrópolis and San Francisco.

North & South

Bishop’s first book of poems, North & South (1946), captures the divided nature of Bishop’s allegiances: born in New England and reared there and in Nova Scotia, she eventually migrated to hotter regions. It contains one of her most anthologized works, “The Fish.” This book was reprinted in 1955, with additions, as Poems: North & South: A Cold Spring, and it won a Pulitzer Prize. Notable among the new poems is “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore,” an affectionate tribute to her fellow poet and close friend that, in its opening line, also pays homage to another poet, Hart Crane: “From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come flying.”

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.

SIGN UP

By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Britannica Quiz

Poetry: First Lines

Questions of Travel, Geography III, and The Complete Poems

Much of Bishop’s later work also addresses the frigid-tropical dichotomy of a New England conscience in a tropical sphere, a prime example being her poem about Brazil, “Manuelzinho.” Questions of Travel (1965) and Geography III (1976) offer spare, powerful meditations on the need for self-exploration, on the value of art (especially poetry) in human life, and on human responsibility in a chaotic world. The latter collection includes some of Bishop’s best-known poems, among them “In the Waiting Room,” “Crusoe in England,” and the exquisite villanelle “One Art.” The Complete Poems was published in 1969 and won a National Book Award the following year.

Teaching career and other works

Bishop taught writing at Harvard University from 1970 to 1977, and she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1976. Her posthumously published poetry collections include The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 (1983) and Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box (2006), the latter of which contains previously unpublished material. The Collected Prose, a volume of fiction and nonfiction, appeared in 1984. A selection of her letters was published under the title One Art in 1994. Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (2008) is a comprehensive collection of her published and unpublished work. Words in Air, a collection of Bishop’s correspondence with Robert Lowell (whose “Skunk Hour” was influenced by Bishop’s “The Armadillo”), was also published in 2008.

Bishop wrote a travel book, Brazil (1962), and translated from the Portuguese Alice Brant’s Brazilian classic, The Diary of Helena Morley (1957). She edited and translated An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (1972). Bishop also was a visual artist, and Exchanging Hats (1996) is a collection of more than 50 of her paintings.