A multivocal treatment well suited to the complex and dappled life
of one of America's premier modern poets. Members of Bishop's wide
circle of friends from literature and the arts (among them John
Ashbery, Robert Giroux, Helen Muchnic, Anne Stevenson, Ned Rorem,
and James Laughlin) recall with eloquence the poet's intelligence,
her reserve, her anxiety, and her peculiar intensity through the
stages and stories of her accomplished and troubled life. Born to a
mentally ill mother and a father who died when she was eight months
old, Bishop (1911 - 1979) spent her early years living with family
members in Worcester, Boston, and Great Village, Mass.
Recollections by her childhood friends reveal a very intelligent
but odd personality - shy, and often embarrassed or pained by
common experiences. Several contributors comment, however, on the
order, discipline, and companionship she found at the Walnut Hill
School between 1927 and '30; there she began to write plays, short
stories, book reviews, and poetry for the school's magazine. From
her Vassar days, Bishop is remembered for her strong mind, arch
wit, sometimes taciturn demeanor, and her talent for writing. With
Mary McCarthy and others, she launched the alternative literary
magazine Con Spirito, which created a sensation on campus and
brought her to the notice of the Ivy League literati of the time,
eventually yielding an introduction to poet Marianne Moore. After
graduating from college, Bishop traveled to New York, Europe, Key
West, and Rio de Janeiro, and through several lesbian love
relationships, the most sustained of which with Iota de Macedo
Soares. Friends recall these adult years as difficult, sometimes
drunken, but also rewarding for Bishop as a person and a poet.
After her lover's death in 1967, Bishop's life took shape around a
series of teaching appointments at the University of Washington,
Harvard, and finally New York University. Although a few of
Fountain's (English dept. chairman at Miss Porter's School) and
Brazeau's (Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, 1983)
transitions push too hard, the portrait of the poet this oral
biography creates is, finally, absorbing and at times beautiful and
graced with artfulness. (Kirkus Reviews)
This book interweaves more than 120 interviews with relatives,
friends, colleagues, and students of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979),
one of America's finest poets. Among the interviewees are numerous
intellectual and artistic figures, including John Ashbery, Robert
Fitzgerald, Robert Giroux, Clement Greenberg, Thom Gunn, John
Hollander, Mary McCarthy, James Merrill, Katha Pollitt, Ned Rorem,
Lloyd Schwartz, Anne Stevenson, Rosalyn Tureck, Helen Vendler and
Richard Wilbur. The chronology which governs this work is as
follows: childhood, 1911-1927; Walnut Hill, 1927-1930; Vassar,
1930-1934; New York, Europe and Key West, 1934-1940; Key West and
New York, 1941-1948; Washington, D.C. and Yaddo, 1948-1951; Brazil,
1951-1957; Brazil, 1958-1965; Seattle, 1966; Brazil, 1966-1967; San
Francisco, 1967-1969; Ouro Preto, 1969-1973; Cambridge and Boston,
1973-1977; and Boston, 1977-1979.
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