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Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

Elizabeth Bishop: Complete Poems 1927-1979

Highly regarded throughout her prestigious literary career, and today seen as an undeniable master of her art, Elizabeth Bishop remains one of America's most influential and widely acclaimed poets. This is the definitive collection of her work. The Complete Poems includes the books North & South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel, and Geography III, as well as previously uncollected poems, translations, and juvenilia.
The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop
ISBN: 0374518173

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

American poet and writer was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. After her father's death and her mother's institutionalization, Elizabeth Bishop lived with her Canadian grandparents in Nova Scotia for a few years, and later with her father's family in Boston, Massachusetts. Elizabeth attended The Walnut Hill School, and entered Vassar College in the fall of 1929, the year of the stock market crash. Elizabeth Bishop graduated from college in 1934, having befriended writer Mary McCarthy.
Elizabeth Bishop was awarded the Houghton Mifflin poetry award in 1946 and, in 1956, the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of poetry, North & South - A Cold Spring. She later received the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as two Guggenheim fellowships. In 1976, she became the first woman to receive the International Neustadt Prize for Literature, and remains the only American to be awarded that prize.
Elizabeth Bishop traveled widely during her lifetime, living in New York, Key West, and, for sixteen years, in Brazil with her companion Lota de Macedo Soares. Elizabeth Bishop often contributed articles to The New Yorker, and, in 1964, wrote the obituary for Flannery O'Connor in The New York Review of Books.
Elizabeth Bishop lectured in higher education for a number of years. For a short time she taught at the University of Washington, before moving to Harvard for seven years. She also taught at New York University, before finishing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Early in her career, Elizabeth Bishop was regarded as a "miniaturist," a master of small poetic structures and descriptive detail. Careful reading of her work, however, reveals a sharp-edged confessional edge: her life story is told through poems which, though nominally addressing and describing other subject matter, in fact speak to true events. Bishop was far from prolific: her Complete Poems is a relatively slim volume.
"Miss Bishop" was notoriously shy. Elizabeth Bishop did not seek or particularly enjoy literary publicity. Though highly regarded by fellow poets, it was only after her death in 1979, and particularly after the 1994 publication of One Art, her collected letters, that Bishop's reputation grew well beyond the small critical fame that she enjoyed in her lifetime.