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 ...
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Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was a poet whose vivid sense of geography won her many honors.Elizabeth Bishop barely knew her parents. Her father died of Bright's disease eight months after she was born...
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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...
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Elizabeth Bishop's critical reputation has grown steadily since her death in 1979. Always a respected poet honored by her peers, Bishop was not well known outside the poetry circles of New York and Bo...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Candace Slater
[The] Brazil in which Bishop so recently lived is already of another era. The early days which the poet spent in the emperor's old summer resort, Petropolis, r...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Herbert Leibowitz
With its calmly circumscribed being and elegant finish, deploying space in formally perfect patterns, each small portfolio of [Elizabeth Bishop's] work rese...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Denis Donoghue
Elizabeth Bishop's work issues from a disposition not even to consider the temptation [to be great]. For a long time she seemed content with the natural piety ...
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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 ...
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Critical Essay by Anne R. Newman
[Elizabeth Bishop's] poetry as a whole is sensitive in its rhythm, which is always integrated with other aspects of forms and theme; but in the four poems whic...
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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...
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Critical Essay by David Shapiro
Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art,"… [a masterly villanelle], is a convincingly drastic approach to the archaic French form. It shows what drabne...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Peter Kemp
Obligingly, the titles of Elizabeth Bishop's volumes of poetry [included in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979]—North and South, Questions of Travel, Geog...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Nathan A. Scott, Jr.
When [Elizabeth Bishop] accepted the Neustadt International Prize for Literature at the University of Oklahoma in the spring of 1976, she spoke about how all he...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Paul Bailey
Robert Giroux, the editor, mentions in his introduction [to The Collected Prose] a remark Bishop once made to him on the subject of the confessional poets: 'You j...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Bonnie Costello
[The essay from which this excerpt is taken was written in 1977.]
In Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, geography is not for adventurers looking out from a center ...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Richard Wilbur
[Elizabeth Bishop once] told me that Poe's best poem, for her taste, was a little-known piece called "Fairy-Land." Years of re-reading that poem ...
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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 ...
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Critical Essay by Jascha Kessler
I have been thinking about the paradox of poetry's ability to show itself forth even while its maker seeks to remain hidden in it, because a book titled The Co...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Adrienne Rich
I have been fascinated by the diversity of challenges that The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 raises, the questions—poetic and political—that it stirs ...
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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...
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Critical Review by Michael Wood
“RSVP,” in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXIV, No. 10, June 9, 1977, pp. 29-30.
In the following essay, Wood reviews Geography III, calling Bisho...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Eavan Boland
“An Un-Romantic American,” in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1988, pp. 73-92.
In the following essay, Boland argues that Bishop is ȁ...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Dianna Henning
“Shards of Childhood Memory,” in Pembroke Magazine, No. 22, 1990, pp. 68-76.
In the following essay, Henning discusses Bishop's techniques of ...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Marilyn May Lombardi
“The Closet of Breath: Elizabeth Bishop, Her Body and Her Art,” in Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal, Vol. 38, No. 2,...
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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, ...
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Critical Essay by Patricia Wallace
“Erasing the Maternal: Rereading Elizabeth Bishop,” in The Iowa Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, Spring/Summer, 1992, pp. 82-103.
In the following essay, Wa...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Zhou Xiaojing
“Bishop's Casabianca,” in The Explicator, Vol. 52, No. 2, Winter, 1994, pp. 109-111.
In the following essay, Xiaojing examines “Casabian...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Vicki Graham
“Bishop's ‘At the Fishhouses,’” in The Explicator, Vol. 53, No. 2, Winter, 1995, pp. 114-17.
In the following essay, Graham examin...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Alicia Ostriker
“I Am (Not) This: Erotic Discourse in Bishop, Olds, and Stevens,” in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, Fall, 1995, pp. 234-54.
In the fol...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Jeffrey Powers-Beck
“‘Time to Plant Tears’: Elizabeth Bishop's Seminary of Tears,” in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 60, No. 4, November, 1995, pp. 6...
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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 ...
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Critical Essay by Charles Edward Mann
“Elizabeth Bishop and Revision: A Spiritual Act,” in American Poetry Review, Vol. 25, No. 2, March-April, 1996, pp. 43-50.
In the following essa...
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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...
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In the following essay, Scott discusses Bishop as a poet who deals exclusively with the material world without a systematic metaphysical or philosophical worldview.
The English critic John Bayley i...
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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,”...
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In the following essay, Carlson-Bradley asserts that Robert Lowell's poem “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” served as an inspiration for Bishop's “Firs...
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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...
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In the following essay, Doreski discusses the influence of Bishop's Canadian ancestry and upraising on her poetry.
To situate her biographer correctly in her life, Elizabeth Bishop wrote Ann...
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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...
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In the following essay, Sanger discusses the impact of linguistic patterns in Great Village, Nova Scotia on Bishop's poetry.
Part of this essay's title comes from an apparently causal...
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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...
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In the following essay, Spires reviews One Art: Letters, finding the volume a “magnificent” addition to Bishop's canon.
If an unknown poet were to be offered a sort of cosmic b...
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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...
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In the following essay, Xiaojing argues that “Rainy Season; SubTropics” contains essential clues to Bishop's poetics.
Elizabeth Bishop's prose poem, “Rainy Season...
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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...
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In the following essay, Irimia examines the connection between the works of Bishop and W. H. Auden.
In the Houghton Collection of the Harvard College Library can be found material from the library ...
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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...
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In the following essay, Shetley examines One Art: Letters against the surge of interest in Bishop's life and work.
Elizabeth Bishop apparently urged most of her correspondents to hold on to ...
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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...
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In the following essay, Mitrano explores Bishop's reticence using animal allegory in “Pink Dog.”
Scholarship on Elizabeth Bishop has traditionally praised her reticence, especi...
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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 ...
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The "Sestina" by Elizabeth Bishop
The "Sestina" by Elizabeth Bishop is titled after the verse form of the Italian origin by that name. However, the name of the poem is not only to r...
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Justice John Paul Stevens says he does not stay on the Supreme Court to set records. But he doesn't sound like someone who is getting ready to retire, either.Stevens just turned 87. He appears in g...
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I first saw Coliseum Books three years ago, just five minutes after an interview for an editorial assistant job at Condé Nast. I had taken the bus down from Cape Cod, where I was staying in a ...
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