Elizabeth Bishop (8 February 1911 – 6 October 1979)


Bishop had two long-term relationships with women. The first was with Brazilian socialite and architect Lota de Macedo Soares.
The second relationship was with Alice Methfessel, whom Bishop met in
1971, beginning a relationship with her. Methfessel became Bishop's
partner and, after her death, her literary executor.

This
is the eighty-sixth post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay
people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of
history.

Elizabeth Bishop (8 February 1911 – 6 October 1979) was an American
poet. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a
Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956 and a National Book Award Winner for
Poetry in 1970. Elizabeth Bishop House is an artist's retreat in Great
Village, Nova Scotia dedicated to her memory. She is considered one of
the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century.

Elizabeth
Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. 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 grandparents on a farm in Nova Scotia, a period she
would later reference in her writing. 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 and she was
removed from the care of her grandparents and moved in with her father's
much wealthier family in Worcester, Massachusetts. However, Bishop was
very unhappy in Worcester and her separation from her grandparents made
her very lonely. It's also significant to note that while she was living
in Worcester, she developed chronic asthma which she would suffer from
for the rest of her life. This time in her life is briefly chronicled in
her poem "In The Waiting Room."

Bishop boarded at the Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts, where
her first poems were published by her friend Frani Blough in a student
magazine Then she entered Vassar College in the fall of 1929, shortly
before the stock market crash. In 1933, she co-founded Con Spirito, a
rebel literary magazine at Vassar, with writer Mary McCarthy (one year
her senior), Margaret Miller, and the sisters Eunice and Eleanor Clark







Travels and awards

Bishop was independently wealthy in early adulthood as a result of an
inheritance from her deceased father that didn't run out until the end
of her life. With this inheritance, Bishop was able to travel widely
without worrying about employment and lived in many cities and countries
which are described in her poemsShe lived in France for several years
in the mid-1930s with a friend she knew at Vassar, Louise Crane, who was
a paper-manufacturing heiress. In 1938 Bishop purchased a house with
Crane at 624 White Street in Key West, Florida. While living there
Bishop made the acquaintance of Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, who had
divorced Ernest Hemingway in 1940.
 


In 1946, Marianne Moore suggested Bishop for the Houghton Mifflin Prize
for poetry, which Bishop won. Her first book, North & South, was
published in 1,000 copies. The book prompted the literary critic Randall
Jarrell to write that “all her poems have written underneath, 'I have
seen it,'" referring to Bishop's talent for vivid description

Upon receiving a substantial (at the time) $2,500 traveling fellowship
from Bryn Mawr College in 1951, Bishop set off to circumnavigate South
America by boat. Arriving in Santos, Brazil in November of that year,
Bishop expected to stay two weeks—but stayed fifteen years.

While living in Brazil, in 1956 Bishop received the Pulitzer Prize for a
collection of poetry, Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring, which
combined her first two books. [It was also during her time in Brazil
that Elizabeth Bishop became increasingly interested in the languages
and literatures of Latin America. She translated into English and was
influenced by South and Central American poets, including the Mexican
poet, Octavio Paz, as well as the Brazilian poets João Cabral de Melo
Neto and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, of whom she said, "I didn't know
him at all. He's supposed to be very shy. I'm supposed to be very shy.
We've met once — on the sidewalk at night. We had just come out of the
same restaurant, and he kissed my hand politely when we were
introduced."[


Bishop lectured in higher education for a number of years starting in
the 1970s when her inheritance began to run out[16]. For a short time
she taught at the University of Washington, before teaching at Harvard
University for seven years. She also taught at New York University,
before finishing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She often
spent her summers in her summer house in the island community of North
Haven, Maine.

In 1977, Bishop published her last book, Geography III, and two years
later, she died of a cerebral aneurysm in her apartment at Lewis Wharf,
Boston. She is buried in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Relationships

Although Elizabeth Bishop was involved in romantic relationships with
women, she did not write about her personal life or her sexual
orientation in her poetry and did not see herself as a "lesbian poet" or
as a "female poet." She only wanted to be judged based on the quality
of her writing and not on her gender or sexual orientation. [

Whereas many of her contemporaries like Robert Lowell and John Berryman
made the intimate details of their personal lives an important part of
their poetry, Bishop avoided this practice altogether.
Bishop had
two long-term relationships with women. The first was with Brazilian
socialite and architect Lota de Macedo SoaresSoares was descended from a
prominent and notable political family;The two lived as a couple for
fifteen years.
Although Bishop was not
forthcoming about details, much of their relationship was documented in
Bishop's extensive correspondence with Samuel Ashley Brown. However, in
its later years, the relationship deteriorated, becoming volatile and
tempestuous, marked by bouts of depression, tantrums and
alcoholismBishop had an affair with another woman and ultimately left
Lota and returned to the United States. Soares, suffering from
depression, followed Bishop to America and committed suicide in 1967.
The second relationship was with Alice Methfessel, whom Bishop met in
1971, beginning a relationship with her. Methfessel became Bishop's
partner and, after her death, her literary executor.

Works by Bishop

Poetry collections
North & South (Houghton Mifflin, 1946)
Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1955)
A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1956)
Questions of Travel (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965)
The Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969)
Geography III, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976)
The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983)
Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and
Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop ed. Alice Quinn, (Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 2006)
Other works
The Diary of Helena Morley, by Alice Brant, translated and with an
Introduction by Elizabeth Bishop, (Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957)
The Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968)
An Anthology of Twentieth Century Brazilian Poetry edited by Elizabeth
Bishop and Emanuel Brasil, (Wesleyan University Press (1972)
The Collected Prose (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984)
One Art: Letters selected and edited by Robert Giroux, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994)
Exchanging Hats: Elizabeth Bishop Paintings, edited and with an
Introduction by William Benton, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996)
Poems, Prose and Letters Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, eds. (New York: Library of America, 2008)
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and
Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano, Saskia Hamilton (Farrar, Strauss
& Giroux, 2008)
Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop . George Monteiro Ed. (University Press of Mississippi 1996)



Awards and honors
1945: Houghton Mifflin Poetry Prize Fellowship
1947: Guggenheim Fellowship
1949: Appointed Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress
1950: American Academy of Arts and Letters Award
1951: Lucy Martin Donelly Fellowship (awarded by Bryn Mawr College)
1953: Shelley Memorial Award
1954: Elected to lifetime membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters
1956: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
1960: Chapelbrook Foundation Award
1964: Academy of American Poets Fellowship
1968: Ingram-Merrill Foundation Grant
1969: National Book Award
1969: The Order of the Rio Branco (awarded by the Brazilian government)
1974: Harriet Monroe Poetry Award
1976: Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize
1976: Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
1977: National Book Critics Circle Award
1978: Guggenheim Fellowship