Elizabeth Bishop Summary

Biography EssayElizabeth Bishop started publishing poems in the mid 1930s, but her reputation as one of the best American poets has emerged rather slowly. She never rushed into print, and only in her ... Read more

Elizabeth Bishop started publishing poems about 1935, but her reputation as one of the best American poets has emerged rather slowly. She never rushed into print, and only in her last years did she gi... Read more

Critical Essay by Marie-claire Blais The body of [Elizabeth Bishop's] work is relatively small, yet one cannot read a single line either of her poetry or prose without feeling that a real poet... Read more

Critical Essay by William Jay Smith It is with the location, both factual and spiritual, of places that [Elizabeth Bishop's] poems often begin. It is with journeys, real and imaginary, to thes... Read more

Critical Essay by David Kalstone [From] the very start, there was something about [Elizabeth Bishop's] work for which elegantly standard literary analysis was not prepared. Readers have been p... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert Holland In Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop teaches us once again that cartography can, in the right hands, be an exact science. Asking again her inveterate traveler's ... Read more

Critical Essay by Eleanor Ross Taylor Reading [Bishop's] The Complete Poems, where scarcely a poem is without its sea and travel image—coast, harbor, map, road—one is not long de... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert Pinsky In Elizabeth Bishop's bizarre, sly, deceptively plainspoken late poem "Crusoe In England," the famous solitary looks back on his life near its end... Read more

Critical Essay by Elizabeth Hardwick [In The Collected Prose] one will find Elizabeth Bishop's mastery of a moderate tone, find it even in the most searing fictions based upon painful recollec... Read more

Critical Essay by Michael Hofmann If Molière is right, and everything that isn't verse is prose, and everything that isn't prose is verse, then, with The Collected Prose of Eliza... Read more

Critical Essay by Mutlu Konuk Blasing The poetry of Elizabeth Bishop sustains seemingly contradictory commentary: she is an autobiographical poet with an impersonal touch; a surrealist given to metic... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert Pinsky [The essay from which this excerpt is taken originally appeared in The New Republic, November 10, 1979.] In Elizabeth Bishop's bizarre, sly, deceptively plai... Read more

Critical Essay by Richard Mullen Some of the enchanted mystery which permeates Elizabeth Bishop's poetry arises from her preoccupation with dreams, sleep, and the borders between sleeping and ... Read more

Critical Essay by David Bromwich Elizabeth Bishop's steadily widening audience and her endurance among the readers she has once claimed are the reward of constancy to an ideal object. Her repu... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert Pinsky The eerie clarity and brilliant surfaces of Elizabeth Bishop's work have always been easy to see. Her first book, North and South (1946), contained poems that h... Read more

Critical Essay by Brian C. Avery “Bishop's ‘The Colder the Air,’” in The Explicator, Vol. 46, No. 4, Summer, 1988, pp. 35-37. In the following essay, Avery exami... Read more

Critical Essay by Jacqueline Vaught Brogan “Elizabeth Bishop: Perversity as Voice,” in American Poetry, Vol. 7, No. 2, Winter, 1990, pp. 31-49. In the following essay, Brogan discuss... Read more

Critical Essay by George S. Lensing “The Subtraction of Emotion in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop,” in The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 48-61. In the following... Read more

Critical Essay by Elizabeth Spires “Elizabeth Bishop: The Things I'd Like to Write,” in The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 62-70. In the following essay, ... Read more

Critical Essay by Mutlu Konuk Blasing “From Gender to Genre and Back: Elizabeth Bishop and ‘The Moose,’” in American Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, Summer, 1994. In t... Read more

Critical Essay by Celeste Goodridge “Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens: Sustaining the Eye/I,” in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, Fall, 1995, pp. 133-54. In the follo... Read more

Critical Essay by James Longenbach “Elizabeth Bishop's Social Conscience,” in English Literary History, Vol. 62, No. 2, Summer, 1995, pp. 467-86. In the following essay, Longe... Read more

Critical Essay by Barbara Page “Elizabeth Bishop and Postmodernism,” in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, Fall, 1995, pp. 166-79. In the following essay, Page examines Bis... Read more

Critical Essay by Thomas Travisano “The Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon,” in New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, Vol. 26, No. 4, Fall, 1995, pp. 903-30. In the ... Read more

Critical Essay by Anne Stevenson “The Iceberg and the Ship,” in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXV, No. 4, Fall, 1996, pp. 704-19. In the following essay, Stevenson discusses the d... Read more

In the following essay, Edelman discusses the possibility of presenting a literal reading of “In the Waiting Room.” I always tell the truth in my poems. With “The Fish,”... Read more

In the following essay, Vendler discusses Bishop's major metaphors, as well as influences on her poetry. Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) wrote in her fifties a revealing set of monologues attribu... Read more

In the following essay, Brogan explores Adrienne Rich's contention that Bishop's lyric voice “explores issues of outsiderhood and difference.” In her 1983 review of Eliz... Read more

In the following essay, Palattella analyzes the political elements of North & South. In January 1946, concerned about the political nontopicality of her forthcoming North & South, Eli... Read more

In the following essay, Oktenberg argues that the publication of Bishop's letters will lead to her poetry being taken more seriously. Elizabeth Bishop is now recognized as one of the major A... Read more

In the following essay, Dickie examines Bishop's choice of poetic form in relation to her subject matter. “Elizabeth Bishop is spectacular in being unspectacular,” Marianne Moo... Read more

In the following essay, Earnshaw praises One Art: Letters. In 1978 Elizabeth Bishop answered a request from a new neighbor at Lewis Wharf in Boston for information about local shops. Her now famous... Read more

In the following essay, Longenbach explores Bishop's interest in social issues, particularly women's rights and feminism. In “Contradictions: Tracking Poems,” the long s... Read more

In the following essay, Travisano examines the sudden rise in the critical opinion of Bishop as one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century. In a 1955 review of “The Year in ... Read more