| |
Family Background
Within thirty-five years of writing, Elizabeth Bishop has merely published nothing more than 5 volumes of poetry. Her sparing works, however, have all been refined and highly-acclaimed ones which are celebrated and praised immensely even till now.
Born Worcester in Massachusetts, Bishop was raised by relatives and grandparents mostly because of the sudden death of William Thomas Bishop. Her mother, Gertrude Bulmer Bishop could not seem to be over the death of the husband and collapsed four years right after William Bishop past away. Eight-month old Bishop did not know the sorrow of her mother from her father’s death, but as a five-year-old young child, Bishop somehow realized the bereavement of losing her mother to insanity. Bishop spent most of her early years with her maternal grandmother at Great Village, Nova Scotia, where she had a good memory and lived a carefree life. When she was taken care of by relatives from her paternal family at Worcester, wealthy life as she might have been brought to live, it is believed that the removal from her grandmother’s residence was later a traumatic experience.
The Birth of a Poet
As an orphan that had lost her parents at a young age, Bishop had learned to adapt herself to melancholic bereavement and loneliness. Perhaps it was the scarce living with her mother that made her start to remember and notice things in detail when she was very young. She became an observant with an acute sense of geography and nature. She loves animal and the nature, and since she was a child, she observed every detail of things and people that she had spent time with. This sharp senses of the surroundings make her survive the solitude and her lack of permanent roots, and help her through years of wandering in her adult life.
TOP
|
| |
A Wandering Soul
After graduated from Vassar, College, she visited her childhood home at Nova Scotia in Canada. Later she traveled in Europe and in North and South America. She stayed in Brazil for more than 15 years after she recovered from an allergic reaction which was violent and made her ill for some time. During the years wandering in North and South America, Bishop formed friendship with Marianne Moore, John Ashbery, Octavio Paz, Robert Lowell, Pablo Neruda and Carlos Drummond. For those Portuguese poet friends, she also translated their collections of poetry to English. After years of traveling, finally, she set foot back on United States and stayed at Boston, where she began teaching at Harvard till her late years.
An Influential and Life-long Friendship
Among her friends, Marianne Moore is the most influential one. For Moore was the one that persuade to explore and cultivate her talents in poetry instead of medicine which also interested Bishop. She and Moore had known each other since the years at Vassar, and not merely did Moore encourage her to elaborate her imagination and her sense of herself, but she helped Bishop in her poem-writing. They send each other their work and gave each other comments.
Style
Bishop is well known for her keen observation on the nature and geography. Her very famous poem “The Map” describes detail observation on geographical place and expresses her philosophy of life. In “The Country Mouse,” Bishop uses her sense of humor and ironically puts her own experience living with relatives into her work. As a pictorial creator, Bishop put a lot of effort on the images, formal patterns of sight and sound. “The Burglar of Babylon” is a close description on Rio; “The Fish” is her most popular poem that has been selected into collections of poems and anthology.
Awards and Recognition
In 1945, her work appeared in the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Competition, from which there were thirty entries of poems that were later selected and published as North & South in 1946. Her second collections of poems, A Cold Spring won her the Pulitizer Prize in 1956, and she later received the National Book Award for her collections in 1970, The Complete Poems, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her Geography III in 1977. What is worth noticing, Bishop was the first American that had received the Neustadt International Prize for literature. It was another honor that had made her works receive nation-wide recognition, in addition to Harriet Monroe Award for Poetry that she received in 1974.
TOP
|
| |
Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2000.
Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998.
International Dictionary of Theatre, Volume 2: Playwrights. St. James Press, 1993.
|
