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.
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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, pp. 7-11.
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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
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Fleur Adcock
Again her introduction is interesting and trenchant. She observes that the early twentieth century already feels remote. Her selection runs from Charlotte Mew (born in 1869) to a clutch of women a little over thirty:...
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 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
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...
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...
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.
Pacernick, Gary. Meaning and Memory: Interviews with Fourteen Jewish Poets. Ohio State University Press.
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For the craft of...
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...
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.
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 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.
Textual Production Frances Horovitz
Greg Gatanby included FH 's poem Invocation in his Whales: A Celebration, 1983. This anthology comprises excerpts from literature, legends, myths, religions, and poetry from around the world. Among others included are Jonathan Swift
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...
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...
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...

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.

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.