Essays on Elizabeth Bishop

February 8, 1911

October 6, 1979

Poet, short-story writer

February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979

Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956.

“Geography III”, “North & South”, “Questions of Travel”,

In her writing, Bishop was able to confess three main themes that existed throughout her life: her unsettled childhood and relationships with her family, the loneliness she felt throughout her life, and an instability and lack of structure, which resulted from the two former themes.

Bishop's style of writing, though it sometimes involved sparse details from her personal life, was known for its highly detailed, objective, and distant point of view and for its reticence on the kinds of personal subject matter that the work of her contemporaries involved. She used discretion when writing about details and people from her life.

Elizabeth Bishop now stands as a major mid-twentieth century American poet, whose influence has been felt among several subsequent generations of poets. Highly regarded by critics such as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, her rising reputation rests on the admiration of poets, including, among the Americans, James Merrill, John Ashbery and Jorie Graham, and, among world poets, Nobelists Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott.

“If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I'm sure it's a good one—and the same goes for paintings. ”
“Hoping to live days of greater happiness, I forget that days of less happiness are passing by.”
“The art of losing isn't hard to master.”