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Elizabeth Bishop
1911–1979
It’s almost impossible not to tell the truth in poetry, I think, but in prose it keeps eluding one in the funniest way.
Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 8th, 1911. Her father died when she was eight months old and her mentally ill mother was institutionalized when she was five, leaving her to be brought up by her grandparents in Nova Scotia and by her maternal aunt in Boston. At Vassar College she befriended and was greatly influenced by Marianne Moore. She was short, rather dumpy and painfully shy, and yet intensely attractive to most who met her – she was an orphan, a severe asthmatic, a lesbian, a self-destructive alcoholic and a voluntary exile. She lived, on her small inheritance, in France, Morocco, Spain, Florida, and from 1951, in Brazil with the love of her life, the architect Lota de Macedo Soares – after whose suicide in 1967 she returned to America. Poetry she produced sparingly, publishing at a rate of one slim volume a decade. Her reputation was always high but never wide: she was a poets’ poet, or as John Ashberry put it, ‘the poets’ poets’ poet’. Today she’s generally recognized as, at least, the finest American poet since the Second World War, along with Robert Lowell, whom she called ‘her best friend’. On the 6 October 1979, Elizabeth Bishop died, suddenly, with characteristic lack of fuss, of a cerebral aneurysm.
My passion for accuracy may strike you as old-maidish – but since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other things that come our way very carefully; who knows what might depend on it?
Curiosities
The epitaph on Bishop’s gravestone is taken from the end of her poem ‘The Bight’: ‘All the untidy activity continues, / awful but cheerful’.
Mary McCarthy said of Bishop: ‘I envy the mind hiding in the words, like an “I” counting up to a hundred waiting to be found.’
Elizabeth Bishop’s mother was committed to McLean’s hospital near Boston, the same institution where Sylvia Plath was treated and where Lowell ended up in 1958 and ’59.
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