The Perfectly Unprolific Poet, Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop wrote 2-3 poems a year, a total of about 100 in her lifetime, each one "crafted with scrupulous care" and worthy of the highest regard. According to Dana Goia (who had Bishop as a teacher at Harvard):

One hundred years after her birth in Worcester, Mass., in 1911, Elizabeth Bishop stands as the most highly regarded American poet of the second-half of the 20th century. She is admired in every critical camp—from feminists to formalists—who agree on little else.

Bishop was born to a Canadian mother who went mad after her American father died when Bishop was a baby. She had a wandering life, a few years with her loving but poor maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, then another few with emotionally distant but well heeled paternal grandparents in the States, then an aunt, and finally boarding school.

In midlife she had a settled interlude of 15 years, living with her partner, a successful architect in Brazil. (In the 1950′s and 1960′s, two women achieving success both in their work and in their home life together strikes me as remarkable. That Bishop's partner, Lota de Macedo Soares committed suicide makes me wonder how much stress they experienced because of being smart and lesbian in the mid-20th c.)

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of her birth, new volumes have been produced from her published and unpublished work, including letters and journals: Prose and Poems.

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(Links: part 2 and part 3)

Here's a confession: I don't know her work. But I'm going to very soon. I'm curious about this woman and inspired by her, being a writer who is not very prolific myself. She chose her words carefully and was respected for it. "What animates Bishop's poetry is the deep authenticity of a writer who knew exactly what she was and never tried to seem otherwise." One couldn't ask for more.

Filed under: Literary Tagged: 20th c women poets, Elizabeth Bishop