Elizabeth Bishop

Who Was Elizabeth Bishop?

Elizabeth Bishop was the most precise and the most reticent of the major American poets of the twentieth century — a writer whose small body of work (fewer than a hundred poems published in her lifetime) has come to be regarded as among the finest poetry written in English in the modern period. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, she lost her father to illness before she was one and her mother to permanent institutionalization when she was five. She was raised by grandparents in Nova Scotia and great-aunts in Worcester, and the experience of displacement and loss became the central subject of her life’s work.

Educated at Vassar, where she became a close friend of Mary McCarthy and began a lifelong correspondence with Marianne Moore, she spent much of her adult life traveling — in Key West, in Brazil, where she lived for fifteen years with her companion Lota de Macedo Soares, and finally in Boston, where she taught at Harvard in the last decade of her life. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 and the National Book Award in 1970.

Bishop’s poetry is characterized by a scrupulous attention to the visible world, a refusal of easy consolation, and a formal precision that holds strong emotion at a carefully maintained distance. Her most famous poem, “One Art,” is a villanelle about loss that builds from the trivial to the catastrophic while maintaining, until the final lines, an ironic composure that makes the emotional collapse all the more devastating when it comes.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• North & South — 1946 — first collection
• A Cold Spring — 1955 — Pulitzer Prize
• Questions of Travel — 1965
• Geography III — 1976 — National Book Award
• The Complete Poems — 1969