Elizabeth Bishop: Poems Background

Elizabeth Bishop was born to become a poet. Like so many of the greatest names in American poetry,
Bishop is a New Englander who came into the world in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911. Almost
immediately commenced a series of events of that would throw her life into tumult and thereby serve to
shape the style and content of her poetry. Before her first birthday Bishop had already lost her father
and four years later she would see her mother for the last time before the older woman’s commitment
to a mental institution. She bounced back and forth between Nova Scotia and Boston before graduation
from Vassar and the meeting in New York that would change her life.

That meeting was with the noted poet a quarter century her senior, Marianne Moore. With the
publication of some poems in Moore’s anthology Trial Balances, Bishop turned her back for good on
pursuing medicine as a career and devoted herself to becoming a full time writer.

This decision did little to bring to an end the lifestyle of alienation, disconnectedness and dislocation
that marked her formative years. Three years in Europe was followed by residence in Key West where
compiled poems for a collection titled North and South which was routinely rejected until finally being
accepted and published in 1946. One year later came yet another introduction that would change her
life: one of the deans of New England poetry descended from a passenger on the Mayflower: Robert
Lowell.

In 1951, the tumultuous life of Elizabeth Bishop took its least like turn yet when a trip to South America
turned into eighteen year stay. After falling ill, Bishop found herself stranded in Brazil. While there she
fell in love with Lota de Macedo Soares and the two women lived in Rio, Petropolis and Ouro Preto until
Soares committed suicide. Bishop moved back to the U.S. following this tragedy, eventually becoming
poet-in-residence at Harvard University in 1969, the same year she won the National Book Award for her
collected Selected Poems. This honor allowed Bishop to join the club of those poets who had won the
two big awards: Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring had previously earned Bishop a Pulitzer Prize in
1956.

Elizabeth Bishop: Poems Summary

The Fish
The speaker tells of catching a tremendous fish which didn’t even put up a fight. Closer scrutiny of the
creature results in the decision to set it free.

One Art
A villanelle that attempts to impose control over regret by providing a laundry list of things—including
places and people—that the speaker has lost over time.

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Elizabeth Bishop: Poems Themes
Nature and Man
Bishop is in constant dialogue with the idea that man is either separate from, or a part of, nature and
she shifts between these two perspectives seamlessly. In 'The Fish' the exterior of the animal is
described in defamiliarizing terms, alienating the reader from the natural world and making us consider
a creature that is predator, prey, food and an external object. In a poem such as 'The Armadillo' humans
are shown to be the cause of havoc and destruction as incendiary Chinese lanterns threaten an
ecosystem. Yet at times man is conceived as no different from nature, as revealed in 'In the Waiting
Room' where it is the natural state of a woman's body that provokes the narrator into existential
meltdown.

Precision
Bishop's work is often seen by critics as a poetry of precision. Indeed, an accuracy to portraying the
external world is a significant feature of her works. In a poem such as 'The Sandpiper', this becomes as
intricate as describing the gaps between grains of sand on a beach. It is this precision that gives her
poetry a scientific whiff; Bishop approaches the artform of poetry as if it were an empirical study, and
her work thrives off this analysis.

Minimalism
Closely associated with her precision, is her minimalism. Greatly influenced by Ezra Pound's philosophy
and Marianne Moore's mentorship of stripping the poem to its bare minimum while retaining - and as a
result increasing - its potency, Bishop would spend years and years upon a single poem that might end
up only being a few lines or stanzas long. 'One Art' seems to self consciously refer to this exercise, as loss
is conceived as a skill that "isn't hard to master".

Mysteriousness
Despite being precise, minimalist and scientific, Bishop's poems are pervaded with a sense of mystery
which borders on the magical. This is evoked actually through her precise, often defamiliarizing
descriptions of the everyday. For example the cans in 'The Filling Station' that appear to "softly speak" or
the striking rainbow of 'The Fish'. Rather than being in opposition to one another, it is the scientific
precision of her poetry itself which feeds into the theme of mystery.

Existential Anxiety
'In the Waiting Room' articulates an individual on the precipice of existential breakdown provoked
through her reflections on the commonplace and everyday. And yet despite her self-questioning, she
returns from such crises without permanent emotional scarring: while we may often descend into crisis,

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Bishop possesses a certain faith within the everyday and natural world which can provide values and
meaning in the face of an often meaningless world.