Elizabeth Bishop

Though successful in terms of awards and appreciation within literary circles—she won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Prize, as well as multiple fellowships and grants—she was not famous when she died in 1979. According to her biographer, “She has become more famous since her death, defying the more typical inverted arc of the American poet’s reputation by refusing to disappear immediately after dying, only to reappear twenty or thirty years later.” (Millier, 550).

Bishop was born on February 8, 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Tragedy found her early and hard as her father died when she was eight months old. Her mother, unable to cope with this sudden loss, was in and out of mental hospitals for five years until finally being institutionalized until her death in 1934. Bishop never saw her mother again. She started far earlier than most of us—floating alone on an unknown sea.

Her childhood suffered more fracture as she was abruptly removed from her maternal grandparent’s home in Great Lakes, Nova Scotia, to live in the cold, well-to-do household of the Bishops in Worcester, Massachusetts. Relentlessly unhappy in the Bishop house, Elizabeth was finally moved again to her maternal Aunt Maud’s house. Here she was first introduced to poetry: “My aunt...recited a great deal to me--Longfellow, Browning, Tennyson. ...I memorized a lot and it soon became an unconscious part of me.” (Johnson, 98-99).

The Bishop family committed to pay for her education. She attended the well-reputed Walnut Hill School for Girls where she was prominent on the school’s Literary Magazine. She attended Vassar and was, again, important in the school’s literary scene. During her junior year, she started to send out poems and stories some of which got published. The most profound event at Vassar impacting her future as a poet, however, was a serendipitous meeting with the poet Marianne Moore—the Vassar Librarian had been a childhood friend of Moore’s and arranged an introduction.

Marianne Moore was immensely important to Bishop. She represented the realized potential for a life as a poet, and, particularly, a woman poet. Moore became an advisor and guide for the shy Elizabeth through the obscure and important New York literary scene, enabling contacts, providing counsel, writing letters of recommendation. She also provided support as a careful critic and, perhaps more important, validated Bishop as a genuine poetic talent. Although the relationship changed over time as Bishop became more confident in her own work, it remained important to Bishop.

At Vassar, several important personal tendencies began more clearly to assert themselves in Bishop: alcoholism, depression, an orientation to lesbianism, a passionate desire to travel, as well as a continuing (it actually began in childhood) and often debilitating asthma. These tendencies would directly influence the patterns and many of the difficulties in her future life. Many of these features reinforced an already apparent propensity to isolate herself. The need for money would be another constant issue, despite a small pension from the Bishop family.

A hunger for travel and the need for new homes in vivid locations, characterized her adult life and influenced much of her poetry. Perhaps this is not surprising for the child who had been cast-off, who had not had a real home: that being ‘free’ to roam and periodically transplant herself felt like a natural, if not completely benign, imperative. It is not surprising then that Bishop’s poetics and poetic voice began to emerge definitively in 1935 with her poem “The Map.” Alexandra Johnson notes that “...the first poem in Elizabeth Bishop’s first book evokes the theme and texture of her own work. Miss Bishop’s poems are delicately shaded maps which chart with immaculate skill the geography of her imagination.” (98).

Bishop traveled extensively and repeatedly. She lived longest in Key West—ten years—and in Brazil—sixteen years. In both places, she lived with a lover/partner (Marjorie Stevens in Key West; and Lota de Macedo Soares in Brazil). Bishop wrote most of the poems that would comprise her first book North & South during her time in Key West, including one of her most famous poems “The Fish.” Invited by Houghton Mifflin, and encouraged by Marianne Moore, Bishop submitted her thin manuscript to compete in their first annual Poetry Prize Fellowship. Bishop won the contest which included publication of her first book and a much needed one-thousand-dollar award.

The book received mostly good reviews. Randall Jarrell, an important critic and poet, wrote positively: “Her work is unusually personal and honest in its wit, perception and sensitivity—and in its restrictions too; all her poems have written underneath ‘I have seen it’.” (Millier, 184). Considering the turmoil of her life—her failed relationship with Marjorie Stevens, alcoholic drinking and writing far less than she wanted—“that she managed to project a relatively firm moral and artistic voice must have struck her as a matter for laughter or tears.” (Millier, 185).

Her book was also favorably reviewed by a young Robert Lowell whom she had met at a party given by Randall Jarrell. This was the beginning of an important, life-long relationship for both Bishop and Lowell which flirted, at times, with romance: “We know that shortly after that visit, Lowell told some friends he was going to marry Bishop.” (Rhul, xiii-xiv). Of course, this did not happen, but this relationship was personally and poetically sustaining for both. Much of their relationship was embodied in more than thirty years of intense correspondence. Lowell, enmeshed in, and important to, the literary inner circles (as Elizabeth was not) was able to be a guide and help to Bishop to seek and win available grants and fellowship.

In 1951, Bishop traveled to South America and began her sixteen-year relationship, the central love of her life, with Lota de Macedo Soares—whom she had met briefly in New York previously. Their relationship escalated rapidly, resulting in Bishop’s moving in with her (and Soares separating amicably from her then partner) at her rural, splendid, isolated estate outside Rio.

Soares was a year older than Bishop. She was the daughter of a prominent Brazilian newspaperman.

She had been born in Paris…and like most educated upper-class Brazilians she conducted her life in at least three languages: Portuguese, English, French. A woman of tremendous ability, Soares was unappreciated in her native country and constantly in need of something to do to occupy her enormous energy. (Millier, 243)

This time began, as many relationships do, with a period of elation, comfort and relative writing productivity for Elizabeth. Soares built a separate writing space near the main house for her. At this time, Bishop began to be able to write about her childhood with the memoir/short story “In the Village” and began her first poems about Brazil, including “Arrival at Santos.”

She had, since the publication of her first book, been slowly, painfully slowly, writing and collecting poems for her next book, including “At the Fishhouses”—about which “Lowell, at Yaddo, speculated...was her best to-date” (Millier, 192)—and, written in Brazil, “The Shampoo,” a subtle, sweetly crafted, beautiful love poem to Soares. Still with only nineteen new poems written for her new book and her publisher asking for more in order to make a fuller volume, Bishop just could not finish enough poems fast enough. “Houghton Mifflin solved the problem by reissuing North & South at the same time. The combined volume was called Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring.” (Millier, 254)

This new volume of Bishop’s poems was received with general acclaim and won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. According to Bishop’s biographer, the poet Donald Hall in his review said: “She was one of the best poet’s alive.” There were, of course, some negative reviews which fed her self-doubt that “she had not yet written ‘real’ poems” (Millier, 255) While the prize added some celebrity to her in Brazil, her drinking problem resurfaced over time, and, at Soares’s insistence, she entered a hospital to dry out. She began a therapy of aversion with Antabuse. Throughout their years together, however, Bishop’s drinking continued to be a problem.

Their relationship deteriorated more significantly as Soares began the massive task of creating a public park out of the crude landscape near Rio and became deeply involved in the unstable politics of Brazil. At this time, Bishop traveled extensively on her own in Brazil as Soares continued to throw herself into her work to the point of damaging her health. In the course of her travels, Bishop developed a separate relationship with another woman in the village of Ouro Preto.

Bishop worked on a few poems and produced the lovely, penetratingly sad “Sestina”. She began work on “The Moose”, an important poem in her oeuvre, which she did not finish until 1971—almost fifteen years later. She did write enough for another thin volume of poetry combined with a few short stories that resulted in the publication of Questions of Travel in 1965. The book was overwhelmingly well-reviewed and, though she did not win, was nominated for a National Book Award. As her relationship with Soares continued to deteriorate, her profile among contemporary poets strengthened.

As Bishop grew increasingly desirous of leaving Brazil, she was offered an opportunity to teach as Poet-in-Residence at the University of Washington. According to her biographer, this prospect terrified the shy and alcoholic Bishop who had never taught and even struggled to read her own poetry in front of a group, but it did offer her a critically needed opportunity to leave Brazil and earn her own money. She accepted and left for Seattle at the end of 1966 with bad feelings between her and Soares.

According to her biographer, Brett C. Millier, over the next dozen years, Bishop would teach poetry at the University of Washington, Harvard and New York University. This became her essential means for earning needed money. While her first attempt was awkward and not very good, she did get better at it. Bishop also developed a clear pattern in these teaching engagements. In each location, she developed very quickly a relationship with another woman who would help her administer her work, comfort her, and protect her when her drinking and depression interfered with her responsibilities. It is appropriate to note here that Bishop steadfastly refused to allow publication of her poems in anthologies that were limited to women poets. Her very defensible stand was: “...I like my anthologies, all the arts, mixed: sexes, colors and races. Art is art and should have nothing to do with gender.” (Farley, 54). One does wonder, however, if years of hiding her lesbianism might also have contributed to this decision.

In the summer, Bishop tried to spend time with Soares in Brazil which went so badly she moved out of the house and into an apartment. They tried traveling together in Brazil which also did not go well. Finally, Soares had to go home under the duress of her deteriorating health and anxiety over their relationship. Bishop left for New York to work with her publisher on her Collected Poems. There she waited for Soares to get better and meet her in New York.

Soares arrived in New York with presents for friends. “They spent a ‘peaceful and affectionate’ evening together and then went to bed. Sometime during the night, Soares got up and took an overdose of tranquilizers.” (Millier, 395). Bishop found her, got her to the hospital, but Soares died about a week later from the combination of the overdose and her other health issues. Bishop was devastated and consumed with guilt.

Bishop’s Complete Poems was not reviewed as widely as Questions of Travel, but was highly praised. “From David Kalstone’s essay “All Eye”: Going back to Miss Bishop’s poems, one finds it all there without any fuss: the most precise psychological connections made between the needs of exact observation and the frail nightmares of the observer, between the strangeness of what is seen and the strangeness of the person seeing it.” (Millier, 417). The Complete Poems won the National Book Award.

Spending time in and around Alice Methfessel, her relationship at Harvard, Bishop was surprisingly productive. She had not written a poem in two years, but now was working on four: “The Moose”, “Poem”, “Night City” and “12 O’Clock News”. As a result of her drinking and other secrets, she was a difficult person to manage and live with or near. Methfessel’s relationship with Bishop was off and on and was difficult. To Bishop: “The thing that was worse was her desperate fear of losing Alice”. This fear led her to begin working on her poem, the villanelle, “One Art”: “…But the poem is also Elizabeth’s elegy for her whole life. Elizabeth apologized for the poem, saying ‘I’m afraid it’s a sort of tearjerker’”. (Millier, 513).

Another thin volume of poetry—Geography III—was published in late 1976. It contained nine new original poems by Elizabeth. Reviewers loved it, though they lamented how small the book was. Margo Jefferson, Newsweek, wrote about Geography III:

…defines that kind of survival which neither blurs nor romanticizes its cost. It maps the regions we live in and the journeys we make—country to country, childhood to adulthood, imagination to fact, art to life—with the greatest care for topographical truth. As always, it is the accumulation of familiar, seemingly minor details and events that illuminates the intense experiences—pain, joy, loss.” (Millier, 527)

Bishop continued to write sparingly. She wrote “North Haven” in honor of her friend Robert Lowell at his death in 1977. After “North Haven”, she wrote just three more poems before her death in 1979: “Santarem”, “Pink Dog”, and “Sonnet”. She died on October 6, 1979 in her home of a cerebral aneurysm.

She was not famous when she died but has become famous since her death. Perhaps this is because, in part, of her need to pursue a poem until its precise voice and, more importantly, its precise findings could be claimed. Each poem seemed to be a march into the sea to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, even when the extraordinary, although it might luminesce, would still not satisfy or particularly encourage.

Works Cited

Farley, Eileen. “Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet visits UW”. Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop. Ed. George Monteiro. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. 98-99. Print.

Johnson, Alexandra. “Geography of the Imagination”. Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop. Ed. George Monteiro. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. 98-99. Print.

Millier, Brett, C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of it. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1993. Print.

Ruhl, Sarah. Preface. Dear Elizabeth--A Play in Letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and Back Again. By Sarah Ruhl. New York: Faber and Faber, Inc, 2014. xiii-xiv. Print.

Toibin, Colm. On Elizabeth Bishop. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015. Print.