Elizabeth Bishop, 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.

Scholar
Linda Anderson argues that Elizabeth Bishop has had "unprecedented significance . . . for a younger generation of British poets."

Milestones
August 1946 EB's first book, the poetry collection
North & South, appeared after hanging fire for years. The year before publication it won her the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Prize: the first time that this thousand-dollar award was made.

December 1976 EB published
Geography III, a volume of poems for which she received the National Book Critics Circle Award.

By January 1983 EB's
The Complete Poems, 1927-1979, was posthumously published;
The Collected Prose followed by November the same year, though its title-page says 1984.
