Elizabeth Bishop is one of the most widely read American poets of the twentieth century. In the decades following her death, her reputation among critics and popularity among readers have increased exponentially. Her lyric poems are marked by a knowing, observant tone and technical virtuosity, even while exploring themes as diverse as grief, alienation, and the intersection of the natural and human worlds. Her collections include the 1946 North and South, the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1955 Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring, and the 1976 Geography III. Of the 101 poems Bishop published during her life, some of the most widely anthologized and beloved are "One Art," published in 1976, "The Fish," published in 1946, and "In the Waiting Room," published in 1976.
Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her childhood was tumultuous: her father died when she was a year old, and her mother was committed to an asylum following a mental health crisis when Bishop was five. She then went to live with her grandparents in Nova Scotia. She spent her childhood between Nova Scotia, Worcester, and Boston, raised at various points by relatives on both her maternal and paternal side. She attended Vassar College, where she became part of a well-known literary circle. Her peers at Vassar, with whom she co-founded the literary magazine Con Spirito, included the poet Marianne Moore—with whom Bishop would remain close throughout her life—and the novelist Mary McCarthy. (Bishop later cultivated a well-known friendship with the poet Robert Lowell as well). She graduated from Vassar in 1934 and embarked on a series of travels in Europe and North Africa.
While Bishop's early travels in Europe and Africa informed her poetry, she produced much of the work that would eventually be published in her first collection while living in Key West, Florida. After four years in Key West, Bishop moved to Brazil with her partner, the architect Lota de Macedo Soares. While in Brazil, she became interested in the country's literary tradition, eventually translating poetry from Portuguese into English. She also developed a fraught relationship with the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, and even produced several English translations of Lispector's work. She spent 14 years in Brazil, but, following Soares's 1967 death, she increasingly spent time back in the U.S. The later years of her career were marked by accolades, including a National Book Award and a Neustadt International Prize for Literature. During the final decade of her life, Bishop taught at Harvard University, and she died in Boston in 1979. In addition to poetry, Bishop worked as a painter, even remarking in an interview with The Paris Review, "I like painting probably better than I like poetry."
Bishop's poetry is known for its tranquil, measured, and detailed observations about the natural world. She is known for focusing on the everyday settings of domesticity and work. Her poems feature scenes drawn both from her travels and from her life in New England. These poems tend not to focus on overt biography or confessional revelations, instead addressing their subjects from an impersonal but engaged distance. The poet and critic Ernest Hilbert has written that Bishop's work is "distinguished by tranquil observation, craft-like accuracy, care for the small things of the world, a miniaturist’s discretion and attention."
Elizabeth Bishop's "Crusoe in England" was published in 1976, in the poet's last collection, Geography III. It retells the well-known narrative of Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist of Daniel Defoe's early English novel Robinson Crusoe. Like Defoe's...
Elizabeth Bishop was born to become a poet. Like so many of the greatest names in American poetry, Bishop is a New Englander who came into the world in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911. Almost immediately commenced a series of events of that would...
One of the most respected American writers of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Bishop (1911 – 1979) is predominantly known as a poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for her poetry collection Cold Springs, and the National Book Award in 1970...
"Filling Station" is a poem by the twentieth-century American writer Elizabeth Bishop. First published in her 1965 collection Questions of Travel, the work mines questions of love, kinship, and connection. It takes place at a filling station (i.e....
"First Death in Nova Scotia" is one of the best-known works by the twentieth-century American poet Elizabeth Bishop. First appearing in The New Yorker in 1962, and then in the 1965 collection Questions of Travel, this work explores themes of death...
"The Fish" is one of Elizabeth Bishop's most celebrated and widely anthologized works. First published in 1946 in the collection North & South, the poem describes the experience of a speaker who catches a fish and then closely observes its...
"In the Waiting Room" is a poem by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, written in 1976. This makes it one of Bishop's later works, written not long before her death in 1979. The poem is written from the point of view of a girl of six, accompanying...
"The Man-Moth" was first published in 1946, in Elizabeth Bishop's collection North and South. However, it was originally written roughly a decade prior, during the 1930s. This work is regarded as one of Bishop's stranger, more surreal poems. It...
“The Monument” is a poem by Elizabeth Bishop originally published in 1939 and then collected in her first book of poetry, North and South, in 1946. The poem is an example of what is known as ekphrastic verse which is just fancy literary...
"The Mountain" is a 1952 poem by Elizabeth Bishop. First published in Poetry magazine, this work was not included in any volume of poetry during Bishop's lifetime. It is written from the perspective of a speaker trying to make sense of herself and...
Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" is a part-autobiographical poem reflecting on the losses that the poet encountered throughout her lifetime. The nineteen-line poem is written in villanelle form and is divided into six stanzas. The poet considers the...
Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina" was initially published in The New Yorker magazine in 1956. It is, as the title indicates, a sestina—an unrhymed verse form with French origins, in which the concluding words of each line in the poem's opening sestet...
