Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was an American poet and short-story writer.

After her father, a successful builder, died when she was eight months old, Bishop's mother became mentally ill and was institutionalized in 1916.

(Bishop would later write about the time of her mother's struggles in her short story "In the Village".) Effectively orphaned during her very early childhood, she lived with her maternal grandparents on a farm in Great Village, Nova Scotia, a period she referred to in her writing.

In 1918, her grandparents, realizing that Bishop was unhappy living with them, sent her to live with her mother's eldest sister, Maude Bulmer Shepherdson, and her husband George.

The Bishops paid Maude to house and educate their granddaughter.

The Shepherdsons lived in a tenement in an impoverished Revere, Massachusetts, neighborhood populated mostly by Irish and Italian immigrants.

The family later moved to better circumstances in Cliftondale, Massachusetts.

It was Bishop's aunt who introduced her to the works of Victorian writers, including Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Bishop was very ill as a child and, as a result, received very little formal schooling until she attended Saugus High School for her freshman year.

She was accepted to the Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts, for her sophomore year but was behind on her vaccinations and not allowed to attend.

Instead she spent the year at the Shore Country Day School in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Bishop then boarded at the Walnut Hill School, where she studied music.

At Shore Country Day, her first poems were published in a student magazine by her friend Frani Blough.

Bishop entered Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in the autumn of 1929, planning to study music in order to become a composer.

In 1933, she co-founded Con Spirito, a rebel literary magazine at Vassar, with writer Mary McCarthy, Margaret Miller, and the sisters Eunice and Eleanor Clark.

Bishop's mother remained in an asylum until her death in 1934, and the two were never reunited.

Later in childhood, Bishop's paternal family gained custody.

She was removed from the care of her grandparents and moved in with her father's wealthier family in Worcester, Massachusetts.

However, Bishop was unhappy there, and her separation from her maternal grandparents made her lonely.

While she was living in Worcester, she developed chronic asthma, from which she suffered for the rest of her life.

Her time in Worcester is briefly chronicled in her poem "In the Waiting Room".

Bishop graduated from Vassar with a bachelor's degree in 1934.

Bishop was greatly influenced by the poet Marianne Moore, to whom she was introduced by a librarian at Vassar in 1934.

Moore took a keen interest in Bishop's work and, at one point, Moore dissuaded Bishop from attending Cornell Medical School, where Bishop had briefly enrolled herself after moving to New York City following her Vassar graduation.

Regarding Moore's influence on Bishop's writing, Bishop's friend and Vassar peer, the writer Mary McCarthy stated, "Certainly between Bishop and Marianne Moore there are resemblances: the sort of close microscopic inspection of certain parts of experience. [However,] I think there is something a bit too demure about Marianne Moore, and there's nothing demure about Elizabeth Bishop."

Moore helped Bishop first publish some of her poems in an anthology called Trial Balances in which established poets introduced the work of unknown, younger poets.

It was four years before Bishop addressed "Dear Miss Moore" as "Dear Marianne" and only then at the elder poet's invitation.

She was introduced to Robert Lowell by Randall Jarrell in 1947, and they became great friends, mostly through their written correspondence, until Lowell's death in 1977.

After his death, she wrote, "our friendship, [which was] often kept alive through years of separation only by letters, remained constant and affectionate, and I shall always be deeply grateful for it."

They also influenced each other's poetry.

Lowell cited Bishop's influence on his poem "Skunk Hour" which he said, "[was] modeled on Miss Bishop's 'The Armadillo'."

Also, his poem "The Scream" is "derived from ... Bishop's story 'In the Village'."

She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976.

Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" (1955) contains allusions on several levels to Moore's 1924 poem "A Grave".

The friendship between the two women, memorialized by an extensive correspondence, endured until Moore's death in 1972.

"North Haven", one of the last of her poems published during her lifetime, was written in memory of Lowell in 1978.

She gave up music because of her terror of performing, and switched her major to English, taking courses in 16th- and 17th-century literature.

Bishop published her work in her senior year in The Magazine, a California publication.

Dwight Garner argued in 2018 that she was perhaps "the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century".

Bishop, an only child, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to William Thomas and Gertrude May (Bulmer) Bishop.