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.
31
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
Material Conditions of Writing Mary McCarthy
When MMC first started writing, she focused her efforts on critical reviews and essays. While still at Vassar she started a rebel literary magazine, Con Spirito, with two of her classmates, Frani Blough and...
Author summary Medbh McGuckian
MMG , who lives in Northern Ireland, is well-regarded among contemporary poets writing in English. She began by writing a very private and reserved poetry. Using images from the home and from nature, she explored...
Reception Medbh McGuckian
Single Ladies was most enthusiastically reviewed by Anne Stevenson in the Times Literary Supplement. She judged MMG 's talent too original to be spoiled by the praise or misunderstanding of critics: her successes are...
Residence Jo Shapcott
JSgrew up in a new town, Hemel Hempstead, which she felt to be a disadvantage for a young writer. There were absolutely no vowel meadows (as in Elizabeth Bishop 's Nova Scotia); instead,...
Residence Elaine Feinstein
By the time the Feinsteins were married they were living in rooms above the bridge in Mill Road, Cambridge (where Arnold was now doing a PhD). Before their first son was born they moved to...
Textual Features Carol Ann Duffy
Many poems here feature women answering back to canonical male voices: Liz Lochhead to Donne , Jenny Joseph to W. S. Gilbert , U. A. Fanthorpe to Walt Whitman , Wendy Cope to A. E. Housman
Textual Features Carol Rumens
In her introduction CR calls for quality and professionalism. Those women writers, she says, who have been concerned with the stern art of poetry as an end in itself have tended to be swamped by...
Textual Features Adrienne Rich
AR focusses on such authors as Lorraine Hansberry and Elizabeth Bishop ; on women's roles in academia; and on the shaping of the subjectivities of lesbian, Jewish, and other minority women in America.
Textual Features Ruth Padel
RP takes the journey as the most central of all poetic images. The first part of her book is a guide to reading poetry, divided under headings of which many include the words journey,...
Textual Features Anne Stevenson
In the title-poem, each of five stanzas ends with a version of the first closing lines: we thought we were living now, / but we were living then.
Stevenson, Anne. Selected Poems, 1956-1986. Oxford University Press, 1987.
128
These we, it seems, are...
Textual Features Anne Stevenson
Despite the strong emotion expressed in some of these poems, AS later remembered the volume as setting free her gift for irony.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press, 1998.
126
The final poem, A Legacy, On my Fiftieth Birthday, is written...
Textual Production Bryher
Desmond MacCarthy had launched Life and Letters in June 1928; it issued its last number this month, and Bryher's new publication first appeared in September. It merged it with the London Mercury after May 1939...
Textual Production Jo Shapcott
In 1999 JS and Don Paterson jointly edited Last Words: New Poetry for the New Century. In 2002 she and Linda Anderson together edited Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, the first book...
Textual Production Marianne Moore
White argues that Moore was essentially two separate poets, pre- and post-World War Two. She chooses to present the earlier one of the two, the poet whom Eliot , Stevens , Williams , and Bishop
Textual Production Elaine Feinstein
EF says her fiction and poetry come from different parts of herself: the voice, the cadences, the rhythms are very different. She sees fiction as involving impersonation of other people.
qtd. in
Pacernick, Gary. Meaning and Memory: Interviews with Fourteen Jewish Poets. Ohio State University Press, 2001.
180
For the craft of...

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