Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Unfortunately, her father passed away when she was only eight months old. Her time at Vassar College marked the start of her career in literature.
Elizabeth Bishop continued to write poems even after finishing college. She lived in various places such as Paris, North Africa, Spain, and Europe before finally settling in Key West after a temporary stay in Florida. In 1946, she published her first collection of poems called North and South. Three years later, she became the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress and was awarded a fellowship by Bryn Mawr College the following year. Until her death, Elizabeth Bishop remained one of the most respected writers of all time. She declined to be included in feminist anthologies because she believed that she should be recognized for her poetry rather than her gender.
I thought Elizabeth Bishop’s biography was very insightful, detail-oriented, and provided an excellent representation of her life and works. I would use this source as a presentation in class to give students a remarkable glimpse into her life in literature. Her book Collection Prose, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1984, contains personal essays about Bishop’s childhood and young adulthood, experiences abroad, and her life as a writer. While the collection is a mixture of personal essays, I must admit that her book is not nearly as good as her poems.
This book is presented in the same format as The Complete Poems, and it doubles what we have of Bishop’s writing. Her editor and friend, Robert Giroux, arranged the book according to a sketch found among Bishop’s papers after her death. He reconstructed her pungent memoir of her mentor, Marianne Moore, from nearly complete fragments. In his affectionate introduction, he brought to life the circumstances under which these pieces were written.
She was an English professor at Harvard University and was well-respected as an American poet and writer. This source is reliable because her book tells many stories and poems about her life growing up, making it very informative. The book is easy to understand, detailed about her work, and I would recommend it to any English professor or student who has not read it. As Mademoiselle says, A stunning collection… These are the kind of stories you should linger over, savor, and rediscover again and again.” (Samuel, Peggy: “Deep Skin” Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art.)
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.
Academic Search Complete. Tarrant County College Library, Arlington TX. March 30, 2013.
Peggy Samuel’s article Deep Skin” provides information about her art of lyric suspension and her involvement in the museum world. She demonstrates how beauty in her work was influenced by Paul Klee’s paintings and colleges. “Deep Skin” examines how suspension functions in Bishop’s poetry, contributing to our knowledge of what is at stake in lyric suspension. The book’s core arguments draw analogies between Bishop’s techniques and those of Paul Klee, Schwitters, and Calder.
Peggy explains Bishop’s intriguing imagination and how she expresses aesthetics, integrity, and openness in her book and poems. Bishop visualizes her poetry by incorporating events into emotions and movements, ranging from small to large, making the impossible possible. In her poems, she creates containers where the lyric speaker is poised with a larger space of unknown dimensions. Stability can incline towards freedom, pleasure, anxiety or grief without overwhelming or collapsing the space of the lyric speaker (178).
This article is a reliable source for critiquing Bishop’s work as it provides good information along with quotes.
I would use this source in a research paper because it contains a lot of information about Elizabeth’s art of lyric and how she expresses herself in her poems. Although the article was easy to understand, I found it a little confusing and had to read it a couple of times to fully grasp the message. However, I would still recommend this article to students and people who have a passion for poetry because it is very interesting to read. It shows how Elizabeth’s imagination can wander into deeper places and come out on paper so remarkably.
In this intriguing journal article, Kathleen Spivack sheds light on Elizabeth Bishop’s life and her friendship with Robert Lowell. Spivack explains how Lowell introduced them and how they became close friends. She also describes how part of Bishop’s family had migrated from Nova Scotia to New England, and how she stayed in Boston. The article, titled Talent in a Teapot,” was published in the Spring 2011 edition of a Boston-based academic journal and can be found on Tarrant County College Library’s database using Academic Search Complete.
“Poetry of Place” was very important to Elizabeth as a writer, but Boston to Elizabeth never caught her imagination. She wasn’t interested in history and didn’t write about it. Instead, she focused on exotic places, poor people, sociological constraints around them, and stray animals. Her work had an eye for human interest and if you read closely, you could see the flirting, humor, sophistication and observation of her individual features. This article is reliable because it tells us about Elizabeth’s literary life as well as her family and friends. It even mentions how Kathleen’s children used to play with Elizabeth’s.
Lowell instructed Kathleen to look after herself, and she did so by becoming even closer to him. Kathleen graduated from Oberlin College and became Lowell’s tutorial student. She later became an author and professor of Literature/Creative Writing in France, where she was highly respected for her work. She received grants and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, among other accolades.
I would use this source in a research paper or presentation to showcase Kathleen’s works, including her poems and what inspired her to become a great writer. This article is easy to understand as it highlights the uniqueness of her poetry.
I would recommend this article to anyone who wants to learn more about Elizabeth Bishop and how her poems can transport you to another place. In Elizabeth at Summer Camp,” William Logan explores Bishop’s upbringing, including the tragic loss of her father, William Bishop, when she was just a baby. Her mother also attempted suicide by jumping from a hospital window, which deeply impacted Elizabeth and led to her experiencing imaginary illnesses and paranoia that made her feel like a criminal being watched.
Source: Logan, William. “Elizabeth at Summer Camp.” Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 88, no. 2, Spring 2012, pp. 52-89. Academic Search Complete Tarrant County College Library Fort Worth TX March 31st ,2013.
In 1916, she was permanently confined to a mental hospital. Her doctors felt that there was no hope of recovery because her daughter had been taught to think that she was dead, according to Frank Bidart. However, she eventually recovered from it. Additionally, she moved in with her mother’s family and when her father’s parents came to see her, they were shocked to see her barefooted racing wildly through the village lanes. As a result, they took care of her and provided for her needs. This source is reliable because it delves deep into her life as a child and the kind of life she had.
William Logan is a professor of creative writing at the University of Florida and a respected writer who has appeared in The New York Times Review. I would use this source because it provides vivid information about Elizabeth’s life growing up. This article was great to read because it offers scripted, emotionally detailed stories about her. Reading this, you would feel sad for her illness and what she went through after her father’s passing. However, the article was easy to understand and made you feel as if you were there with her experiencing her pain. I’m sure many people can relate to her work.
MacAuthor, Marit In a Room” Texas Studies in Literature Winter 2008 Vol. 50 408-442 Academic Search Complete Tarrant County College Library Fort Worth TX March 31, 2013
Elizabeth Bishop emerged as a writer during the rise of fascism and composed several poems for her first collection. One reason why they did not really connect with her early work was due to the late date of its publication compared to most of her books that had appeared in major magazines for over a decade before North & South was published.
Marit explains that Bishop started traveling around the world, writing and publishing books about her journey. During her first trip to Europe, she was overwhelmed with a sense of homesickness, which she identified as a terrible feeling of death and physical and mental illness. Bishop would often say that when these feelings came over her, she felt unable to speak, swallow or even breathe properly. In 1964, Anne Stevenson received a letter from Bishop about her early work in Brazil; Stevenson went on to become Bishop’s first biographer.
This source is reliable because it sheds a different light on how Bishop writes her poems. Her work is so magnificent that it speaks for itself. I would use this source for essays, presentations, and to help my fellow classmates learn how her literature evolved. The article was easy to understand because Marit talked about traveling to different states to advertise Bishop’s work.
In conclusion, the cited sources were able to provide useful facts and information. They helped show how Elizabeth Bishop used her past and life experiences to develop her poetry.
