Elizabeth Bishop: A Brilliant, Understated Poet
ELIZABETH BISHOP was U.S. poet laureate in 1949–1950; won the a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and a National Book Award in 1970. She was one of the great American poets of the 20th century — but she didn’t act like one. She was not a flamboyant or confessional writer and she once wrote, “Punctuation is my Waterloo.” She had a sort of stage fright about public events, and she’s little-known beyond the poetry world.
Bishop had a painfully difficult life. An only child, she was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911. Her father, William Bishop, was a conventional man, a wealthy executive in a family construction business who died of Bright’s Disease when Elizabeth was eight months old.
Elizabeth’s mother, Gertrude Boomer Bishop, was a depressive nurse who met William when he was a hospital patient. William’s death made Gertrude go home to Canada, so Elizabeth was taken to a farm in Nova Scotia — where Gertrude had hallucinations, and several nervous breakdowns, each more violent than the last. When Elizabeth was five years old, Gertrude disappeared into an “insane asylum.” Mother and daughter never saw each other again.
As a woman, Bishop wrote: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seemed filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”
William Bishop’s parents insisted that Elizabeth be ‘educated properly’ which they thought must be done in the United States, and so she was — but she felt herself as much Canadian as American. Later, she lived for years in Brazil. Memories of Nova Scotia figure in “The Moose,” a poem Bishop worked on for 20 years. It opens this way: “From narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea / Home of the long tides…”
Long tides swept Bishop from place to place, feeding her prodigious memory, but feeding on it, too. Part of the bond she felt with poetry was that a poem has no fixed location.
Another painful aspect of life for her was that she was attracted to women at a time when lesbian love affairs were taboo in polite society — and it was largely polite society that sustained poetry.
She grew up mostly in Worcester and Revere and Cliftondale, Massachusetts, looked after by a sister of her mother, Maud Boomer Shepherdson. Maud introduced her to the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But Elizabeth knew from an early age that “I was made at right angles to the world.”
She went to three different high schools, the last one a boarding school — and then to Vassar. Her teachers and professors didn’t understand her, but they exposed her to first-rate writing. Her college boyfriend proposed marriage; and when she refused him, the postcard he sent her said, “Go to hell, Elizabeth.” Then he killed himself.
In 1946, Bishop published her first book, “North and South,” which included the lines: “I caught a tremendous fish… brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper… speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime” and with gills “fresh, and crisp with blood.” After seeing that her catch had, hanging from its jaw, five old pieces of fishline, Bishop was moved by the old fish’s toughness and ended her poem with: “I let the fish go.”
She let a LOT of fish go, chose not to publish many of her poems. She drank too much.
Marianne Moore was a helpful mentor, who helped Elizabeth get her poetry published. Other poets were kind, too — but the great poet friend of her life was Robert Lowell, whom she met at a dinner party in 1947. Their correspondence is a wonder.
Lowell called his depressive moods “these wretched little black splinters.” His daughter Harriet described her father as “present and loving, whatever his mental state, and wonderfully odd.”
Bishop once wrote, “All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful.” She lived in awe of optimism, its way of sweeping all people and moods before it — but also hated it as false, painting the world instead of cherishing it, trying to conceal the incriminating. In Robert Lowell, she found a friend who scorned optimism.
Men rarely propose marriage to alcoholic lesbians 12 years older than they are, but Elizabeth and her poems truly cast a spell over Robert Lowell, and he sometimes hoped to marry her. She put him off, gently, and they sent each other those marvelous letters and feasted on each other’s words.
She wrote the marvelous line: “The iceberg cuts its facets from within.”
And in another poem: “More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.” Lowell wrote the line: “A savage servility slides by on grease.”
Elizabeth was more shy and sensible than Robert and her poems are more whimsical and wry; his poems are heavier and full of weight, in both good ways and bad. Her poems skirt the disasters she’s known; his poems tend to describe his miseries head-on.
Lowell differed from Bishop in being eager to take on big “public” subjects. Upset by pollution, by the Vietnam War and a certain soulless quality to the United States, in 1967 Lowell published “Waking Early Sunday Morning”
Pity the planet, all joy gone
From this sweet volcanic cone;
Peace to our children when
they fall
in small war, on the heels of
small
war — until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.
She admired this poem; she used to say you know a poem is good if, after you read it, for 24 rich hours the world LOOKS LIKE that poem.
But when Bishop got a draft of Lowell’s poem “The Dolphin,” which was based on some angry letters from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, Bishop was quick to protest “the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions. Infinite mischief would lie in that.”
Silliness had its place in Bishop’s world because it brings laughter, always a blessing. But foolishness was different, and she would turn on herself for “like a sandpiper running down the edges of different countries and continents, looking for something.” Delight was natural to her but a fuller happiness was something rented, temporary.
The love of Bishop’s life was the aristocratic Brazilian woman Lota de Macedo Soares, and Elizabeth and Lota lived together for years in Rio de Janeiro. They met when Bishop was recovering from an allergic attack after eating bad cashews.
Elizabeth loved Lota and Lota loved her — but, over time, their relations grew difficult, tempestuous. A rival appeared for Lota’s affection, writing passionate letters; Elizabeth threw those letters in the Sao Francisco River. Lota Soares died of a fatal overdose of drugs which she ingested in Bishop’s apartment. Another deep loss.
Shy, self-doubting, full of self-mockery and dry wit, Bishop finished her deftly powerful poems slowly. In those poems, joy is often on the surface, and melancholy beneath. She called dreams “armored cars… contrived to let us do so many a dangerous thing.” In 35 years, she wrote just five volumes of poetry. But she was revered by her peers. James Merrill wrote of Bishop’s “lifelong impersonations of an ordinary woman.”
In 1972, Bishop moved from Brazil to Boston. Despite a string of misfortunes in her personal and medical life, she published the brilliant “Geography III,” containing just 10 marvelous poems.
In 1976, she taught a poetry-writing course at Harvard.
On the very day Elizabeth Bishop died in 1979, she wrote a letter to the editor of a poetry anthology which had published some of Bishop’s poetry with explanatory notes that Bishop felt reduced the poetry. She believed that between a poet and her readers, clarity and transparency are not half so important as bolts of inspiration, flashes of meaning, even if the meaning felt by the reader is not what stirred the poet to write.
Bishop said in her letter: “If a poem catches a student’s interest at all, he or she should damned well be able to look up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary… You can see what a nasty teacher I must be…”
In her world, the impulses of kind instructors turn nasty, plans go awry, intended meaning evaporates, and the complicated and calculated strain and afflict the innocent. Our lives have a certain sturdy idiocy, no matter where we go, or what we try to make of them. And loved ones vanish. Elizabeth Bishop once wrote Robert Lowell: “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”