Elizabeth Bishop

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Standard Name: Bishop, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Bishop
Pseudonym: Mr Margolies
EB , a leading US poet of the later twentieth century, published six volumes of poetry during her lifetime, of which several collect writing already published. Her prose included translations, essays, a travel book, and scintillating personal letters. Her fellow-poet Anne Stevenson calculates her total output at fewer than a hundred poems, including prose poems, of which Bishop herself would have accepted by no means all as worthy or finished. Yet her impact has been extraordinary.
Stevenson, Anne. “The Geographical Mirror”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, 2002, pp. 31-41.
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Scholar Linda Anderson argues that EB has had unprecedented significance . . . for a younger generation of British poets.
Anderson, Linda. “Introduction”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, 2002, pp. 7-11.
7
Black-and-white photograph of Elizabeth Bishop in 1964. Her hair is short and wavy; her chin rests on one hand. She wears pearl ear studs and a shirt with notched collar. In front of her stands an object which might be a group of miniature national flags.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation Mavis Gallant
Despite living much the greater part of her life in Paris, MG never thought of herself as anything but Canadian, saying I suppose that a Canadian is someone who has a logical reason to think...
Education Mary McCarthy
A year later, in 1926 MMC enrolled at Annie Wright Episcopal Boarding School in Tacoma. She would travel home to Seattle some weekends by boat or on the Interurban streetcar. Further elaborating on different...
Friends, Associates Edith Sitwell
During her first visit to the USA, ES met Charlie Chaplin , Greta Garbo , and Marianne Moore . A press party at the Gotham Book Mart in New York was attended by ES ...
Friends, Associates Marianne Moore
MM met Elizabeth Bishop , who became in literary terms one of her most important friends and whom she mentored and helped to get published.
Astley, Neil. “Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography; Elizabeth Bishop: Chronology”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, 2002, pp. 175-00.
194
Friends, Associates Flannery O'Connor
A less likely friend among the many relationships sustained largely by letter was Mary Ataway Lee , known as Maryat, sister of a new president of Georgia State College for Women. She lived in New...
Friends, Associates Seamus Heaney
A friendship that helped SH 's poetry was that with Philip Hobsbaum , who managed a living transplant of the 1960s Group from London to Belfast.
qtd. in
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
4048 (31 October 1980): 1222
Other friends included Irish...
Intertextuality and Influence Jo Shapcott
Epigraphs to particular poems quote Chaucer , Swift , Elizabeth Barrett , Elizabeth Bishop , Geoffrey Bateson , and (most frequently) Elizabeth Hardwick . The title-poem (called by a reviewer Kafka esque)
Wormald, Mark. “Making a virtue of double vision”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4497, 9–15 June 1989, pp. 241-2.
642
exemplifies...
Intertextuality and Influence Elaine Feinstein
Home in this collection opens, Where is that I wonder? It then evokes comfortable, elegant settings of both childhood and adult life, and also a place where the poet awakes from dreaming of her dead...
Intertextuality and Influence Ruth Padel
Having loved and immersed herself in poetry all her life, RP took a gamble and changed her self-definition from university lecturer in classics to professional writer and poet. Fifteen years later, writing of her own...
Intertextuality and Influence Anne Stevenson
During her first marriage AS tried to write a novel, but found (like Sylvia Plath 's heroine in The Bell Jar) that she had nothing to say.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press, 1998.
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It was Donald Hall , she...
Intertextuality and Influence Felicia Hemans
Casabianca was for years a set piece for recitation in schools, prompting numerous responses including Elizabeth Bishop 's powerful poem of the same name.
Literary responses Marianne Moore
Elizabeth Bishop , who wrote on MM on several occasions, mentioned her in a letter of advice to a would-be poet as one of the great poets of our own century, who should be read...
Literary responses Anne Sexton
Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell that these poems were good, in spots only, less fully realised than his on a similar subject-matter. I feel I know too much about her . . ....
Literary responses Anne Sexton
Like To Bedlam and Part Way Back before it, this was nominated for the National Book Award but did not in the end win. It brought Sexton, however, the award of a travelling scholarship from...
Literary responses Flannery O'Connor
Reviews were more mixed than for FOC 's previous book, but included some responses from reviewers and friends that that delighted her, notably comments from Joan Didion and Elizabeth Bishop .
Gooch, Brad. Flannery. Little, Brown and Co., 2009.
320-1

Timeline

12 February 1980: US poet Muriel Rukeyser died in Greenwich...

Writing climate item

12 February 1980

US poet Muriel Rukeyser died in Greenwich Village, New York, two years after publishing her Collected Poems and four years after her last new collection, The Gates, 1976.
Gardinier, Suzanne. “The Moral Imagination”. Women’s Review of Books, Vol.
23
, No. 4, July–Aug. 2006, pp. 10-11.
10-11

Texts

Bishop, Elizabeth, and Tom Paulin. Complete Poems. Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Bishop, Elizabeth. Geography III. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.
Bishop, Elizabeth. North & South. Houghton Mifflin, 1946.
Bishop, Elizabeth. Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring. Houghton Mifflin, 1955.
Bishop, Elizabeth. Questions of Travel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965.