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, 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, 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
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 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.
128
These we, it seems, are...
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 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.
126
The final poem, A Legacy, On my Fiftieth Birthday, is written...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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 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.
320-1
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 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.

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