Background
Bishop, Elizabeth was born on February 8, 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. Daughter of William Thomas and Gertrude (Bulmer) Bishop.
(Highly regarded throughout her prestigious literary caree...)
Highly regarded throughout her prestigious literary career, and today seen as an undeniable master of her art, Elizabeth Bishop remains one of America's most influential and widely acclaimed poets. This is the definitive collection of her work. The Complete Poems includes the books North & South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel, and Geography III, as well as previously uncollected poems, translations, and juvenilia. Highly regarded throughout her prestigious literary career, and today seen as an undeniable master of her art, Elizabeth Bishop remains one of America's most influential and widely acclaimed poets. This is the definitive collection of her work. The Complete Poems includes the books North & South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel, and Geography III, as well as previously uncollected poems, translations, and juvenilia.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374518173/?tag=2022091-20
(Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bish...)
Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that "you ha[ve] always been my favorite poet and favorite friend." The feeling was mutual. Bishop said that conversation with Lowell left her feeling "picked up again to the proper table-land of poetry," and she once begged him, "Please never stop writing me letters―they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days." Neither ever stopped writing letters, from their first meeting in 1947 when both were young, newly launched poets until Lowell's death in 1977. The substantial, revealing―and often very funny―interchange that they produced stands as a remarkable collective achievement, notable for its sustained conversational brilliance of style, its wealth of literary history, its incisive snapshots and portraits of people and places, and its delicious literary gossip, as well as for the window it opens into the unfolding human and artistic drama of two of America's most beloved and influential poets.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374531897/?tag=2022091-20
(POEMS This is the definitive edition of the work of one o...)
POEMS This is the definitive edition of the work of one of America's greatest poets, increasingly recognized as one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century, loved by readers and poets alike. Bishop's poems combine humor and sadness, pain and acceptance, and observe nature and lives in perfect miniaturist close-up. The themes central to her poetry are geography and landscape―from New England, where she grew up, to Brazil and Florida, where she later lived―human connection with the natural world, questions of knowledge and perception, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos. This new edition―edited by Saskia Hamilton―offers readers the opportunity to take in, entire, one of the great careers in twentiethcentury poetry. PROSE Elizabeth Bishop's prose is not nearly as well known as her poetry, but she was a dazzling and compelling prose writer too, as the publication of her letters has shown. Her stories are often on the borderline of memoir, and vice versa. From her college days, she could find the most astonishing yet thoroughly apt metaphors to illuminate her ideas. This volume―edited by the poet, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, and Bishop scholar Lloyd Schwartz―includes virtually all her published shorter prose pieces and a number of prose works not published until after her death. Here are her famous as well as her lesser-known stories, crucial memoirs, literary and travel essays, book reviews, and―for the first time―her original draft of Brazil, the Time/Life volume she repudiated in its published version, and the complete extant correspondence between Bishop and the poet Anne Stevenson, the author of the first book-length volume devoted to Bishop.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374125589/?tag=2022091-20
(Elizabeth Bishop's prose is not nearly as well known as h...)
Elizabeth Bishop's prose is not nearly as well known as her poetry, but she was a dazzling and compelling prose writer too, as the publication of her letters has shown. Her stories are often on the borderline of memoir, and vice versa. From her college days, she could find the most astonishing yet thoroughly apt metaphors to illuminate her ideas. This volume―edited by the poet, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, and Bishop scholar Lloyd Schwartz―includes virtually all her published shorter prose pieces and a number of prose works not published until after her death. Here are her famous as well as her lesser-known stories, crucial memoirs, literary and travel essays, book reviews, and―for the first time―her original draft of Brazil, the Time/Life volume she repudiated in its published version, and the correspondence between Bishop and the poet Anne Stevenson, the author of the first book-length volume devoted to Bishop.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374532737/?tag=2022091-20
(Whether writing about waiting as a child in a dentist's o...)
Whether writing about waiting as a child in a dentist's office, viewing a city from a plane high above, or losing items ranging from door keys to one's lover in the masterfully restrained "One Art," Elizabeth Bishop somehow conveyed both large and small emotional truths in language of stunning exactitude and even more astonishing resonance. As John Ashbery has written, "The private self . . . melts imperceptibly into the large utterance, the grandeur of poetry, which, because it remains rooted in everyday particulars, never sounds ‘grand,' but is as quietly convincing as everyday speech."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374530653/?tag=2022091-20
(Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, editors James Merrill d...)
Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, editors James Merrill described Elizabeth Bishop's poems as "more wryly radiant, more touching, more unaffectedly intelligent than any written in our lifetime" and called her "our greatest national treasure." Robert Lowell said, "I enjoy her poems more than anybody else's." Long before a wider public was aware of Bishop's work, her fellow poets expressed astonished admiration of her formal rigor, fiercely observant eye, emotional intimacy, and sometimes eccentric flights of imagination. Today she is recognized as one of America's great poets of the 20th century. This unprecedented collection offers a full-scale presentation of a writer of startling originality, at once passionate and reticent, adventurous and perfectionist. It presents all the poetry that Bishop published in her lifetime, in such classic volumes as "North & South," "A Cold Spring," "Questions of Travel," and "Geography III." In addition it contains an extensive selection of un_published poems and drafts of poems (several not previously collected), as well as all her published poetic translations, ranging from a chorus from Aristophanes' The Birds to versions of Brazilian sambas. "Poems, Prose, and Letters" brings together as well most of her published prose writings, including stories; reminiscences; travel writing about the places (Nova Scotia, Florida, Brazil) that so profoundly marked her poetry; and literary essays and statements, including a number of pieces published here for the first time. The book is rounded out with a selection of Bishop's irresistibly engaging and self-revelatory letters. Of the 53 letters included here, written between 1933 and 1979, a considerable number are printed for the first time, and all are presented in their entirety. Their recipients include Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, Anne Stevenson, May Swenson, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1598530178/?tag=2022091-20
(When the distinguished art critic Meyer Schapiro said tha...)
When the distinguished art critic Meyer Schapiro said that Elizabeth Bishop "writes poems with a painter's eye," Bishop was "very flattered: I'd love to be a painter." The fact is―though not many knew it―she painted throughout her life, as this handsome book, reproducing in full color forty of her works, demonstrates. The paintings were tracked down, identified, and collected by the poet and art writer William Benton, who arranged the first exhibit of Bishop's artwork (twenty-seven pieces) in January 1993 at the East Martello Tower Museum as part of the Key West Literary Seminar on Bishop's writing. Probably the best-known paintings are the three or four that decorated the dust jackets of earlier editions of her books, but most of her artwork has never been reproduced. Some, like E. Bishop's Patented Slot-Machine, come as a total surprise. William Benton gives the provenance, dimensions, and (where possible) the date of each work. In the second half of the book, he also cites many painterly passages from Bishop's writing. Typically, after admitting that occasionally she painted "a small gouache or watercolor," Bishop asserted: "They are Not Art―NOT AT ALL." William Benton concludes, "They are, though." In paperback for the first time since its publication, this edition of Exchanging Hats is sure to generate a renewed appreciation for this multi-talented artist.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374533431/?tag=2022091-20
Bishop, Elizabeth was born on February 8, 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. Daughter of William Thomas and Gertrude (Bulmer) Bishop.
Bishop boarded at the Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts, where she studied music.
Then she entered Vassar College in the fall of 1929.
She gave up music because of a terror of performance and switched to English where she took courses including 16th and 17th century literature and the novel.
(POEMS This is the definitive edition of the work of one o...)
(Highly regarded throughout her prestigious literary caree...)
(Elizabeth Bishop's prose is not nearly as well known as h...)
(Robert Lowell once remarked in a letter to Elizabeth Bish...)
(Whether writing about waiting as a child in a dentist's o...)
(Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, editors James Merrill d...)
(When the distinguished art critic Meyer Schapiro said tha...)
Member National Institute Arts and Letters, Academy American Poets (chancellor 1966-1979).