Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Bishop
-
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.
Here ASargues that change is time's one permanent condition, that it continually transforms the present into the past at the very moment it opens the future to further change. Quoting from her own The...
Textual Production
Anne Stevenson
AS
retains her belief in poetry's need and capacity to reach out to elusive reality, to the ahuman, wordless world.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press.
173
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press.
170-1
She keeps an Ongoing Anthology, a loose-leaf folder with copies of...
Textual Production
Anne Stevenson
AS
published Elizabeth Bishop, a title in the Twayne
's United States Authors series of critical studies with prefatory biography.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production
Anne Stevenson
AS
returned to a favourite mentor-poet in her Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop, the first volume in the series Agenda/Bellew Poets on Poetry.
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,...
Wormald, Mark. “Making a virtue of double vision”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4497, pp. 241-2.
642
exemplifies...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Jo Shapcott
Her lectures deal with the way poets are transformed by what they read, with her own relationships with Rainer Maria Rilke
(whom she has translated), Elizabeth Bishop
, and others, and with the question of...
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 . . ....
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.
