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 in Worcester, Massachusetts, February 8, 1911. Her mother, Gertrude, never got over the death of her husband William and suffered a nervous collapse, eventually going insane. She was removed to a sanatorium when her young daughter was five.

One of her earliest and most vivid memories of her mother was of a ride in a swan boat in the Boston Public Garden. Bishop was dressed in black, as had been her wont since her husband's death. "One of the live swans paddling around us bit my mother's finger when she offered it a peanut," Bishop wrote. "I remember the hole in the black glove and a drop of blood on it." Thus was the beginning of a...