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A profoundly visual poet, Elizabeth Bishop is said to have a prismatic way of seeing. In this companion to Bishop's poetry, making connections between modern art and modern poetry, Bonnie Costello aims to give a sense of the poet and her ways of seeing and writing. Costello also makes use of quotations from Bishop's letters, drafts, journals and occasional prose sketches. ... Read more

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A Collection poetry written in, around, and about the Low Country of South Carolina. It includes pets, inspiration, freedom, and general life. ... Read more

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This study charts the evolution of Bishop's poetry, aided by newly discovered diaries, previously unpublished work and early drafts. It focuses on the poet's 20-year residence in Brazil, and attempts to provide a new understanding of Bishop's treatment of love, sex and gender. ... Read more

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Revealing book on poetry and gender
Catherine Cucinella's intense book about bodily representation provides a new way of seeing the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Marilyn Chin, and Marilyn Hacker. Its synthetic theorizations, illuminating close readings, and final dialogue with Chin bring the study of the represented female body to a new plateau. This book reveals all four of these poets in a new light, and it gives the best readings yet of Millay, Hacker, and especially Chin. Anyone interested in poetry, gender, feminism, or sexuality will find much to ponder here. An essential book. ... Read more

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This examination of Bishop's work - poetry, prose and selected unpublished material - reveal how personal loss becomes implicated in her vision of self and how gender and sexual identity influence the experience of loss in her writing. ... Read more

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Becoming a Poet traces the evolution of Elizabeth Bishop's poetic career through her friendships with other poets, notably Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. Published in 1989 following critic David Kalstone's death, with the help of a number of his friends and colleagues, it was greeted with uniformly enthusiastic praise. Hailed at that time as "one of the most sensitive appreciations of Elizabeth Bishop's genius ever composed" and "a first-rate piece of criticism" and "a masterpiece of understanding about friendship and about poetry," it has been largely unavailable in recent years.
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In this original study of Elizabeth Bishop's lifelong engagement with Christianity, Laurel Snow Corelle illuminates the ways in which Bishop's Protestant childhood and reading of Christian literature, coupled with her deep commitment to agnosticism, inform the works of this former poet laureate of the United States. Corelle sees in Bishop's writing a sophisticated and sustained interrogation of orthodoxy that exquisitely balances Bishop's religious upbringing with her agnostic stance.

Corelle immerses the reader in Bishop's works and world in order to convey the rigor, subtlety, and complexity of the poet's dialogue with Christianity and its literature. Bishop was a self-proclaimed nonbeliever; yet she grew up in two devout Protestant homes and she studied Christian literature throughout her life. As a result some of the perspectives and prejudices voiced in her verse are transparently Protestant. Placing Bishop's work in direct relation to some of her favorite Christian texts, Corelle locates her within the intellectual milieu of post-World War II America in which she wrote.

The study, which spans the course of Bishop's poetry and draws as well on her letters and prose, illustrates how she incorporated allusions to scripture and Protestant sacraments in a subversive critique of organized Christianity and how her appropriation of three traditional genres common to Christian literature--allegory, pastoral elegy, and spiritual autobiography--advanced her own poetic purposes.

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Elizabeth Bishop is one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. When she died in 1979, she had only published four collections, yet had won virtually every major American literary award, including the Pulitzer Prize. She maintained close friendships with poets such as Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, and her work has always been highly regarded by other writers. In surveys of British poets carried out in 1984 and 1994 she emerged as a surprising major choice or influence for many, from Andrew Motion and Craig Raine to Kathleen Jamie and Lavinia Greenlaw.A virtual orphan from an early age, Elizabeth Bishop was brought up by relatives in New England and Nova Scotia. The tragic circumstances of her life - from alcoholism to repeated experiences of loss in her relationships with women - nourished an outsider's poetry notable both for its reticence and tentativeness. She once described a feeling that 'everything is interstitial' and reminds us in her poetry - in a way that is both radical and subdued - that understanding is at best provisional and that most vision is peripheral.Since her death, a definitive edition of Elizabeth Bishop's "Complete Poems" (1983) has been published, along with "The Collected Prose" (1984), her letters in "One Art" (1994), her paintings in "Exchanging Hats" (1996) and Brett C. Millier's important biography (1993). In America, there have been numerous critical studies and books of academic essays, but in Britain only studies by Victoria Harrison (1995) and Anne Stevenson (1998) have done anything to raise Bishop's critical profile."Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery" is the first collection of essays on Bishop to be published in Britain, and draws on work presented at the first UK Elizabeth Bishop conference, held at Newcastle University. It brings together papers by both academic critics and leading poets, including Michael Donaghy, Vicki Feaver, Jamie McKendrick, Deryn Rees-Jones and Anne Stevenson. Academic contributors include Professor Barbara Page of Vassar College, home of the Elizabeth Bishop Papers. ... Read more

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This highly innovative work on poetic influence among women writers focuses on the relationship between modernist poet Elizabeth Bishop and her mentor Marianne Moore. Departing from Freudian models of influence theory that ignore the question of maternal presence, Joanne Diehl applies the psychoanalytic insights of object relations theorists Melanie Klein and Christopher Bollas to woman-to- woman literary transactions. She lays the groundwork for a far-reaching critical approach as she shows that Bishop, mourning her separation from her natural mother, strives to balance gratitude toward Moore, her literary mother, with a potentially disabling envy.Diehl begins by exploring Bishop's memoir of Moore, "Efforts of Affection," as an attempt by Bishop to verify Moore's uniqueness in order to defend herself against her predecessor's almost overwhelming originality. She then offers an intertextual reading of the two writers' works that inquires into Bishop's ambivalence toward Moore. In an analysis of "Crusoe in England" and "In the Village," Diehl exposes the restorative impulses that fuel aesthetic creation and investigates how Bishop thematizes an understanding of literary production as a process of psychic compensation. ... Read more

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Although Elizabeth Bishop is often viewed as an apolitical, purely descriptive poet, her poems are much more rhetorical than they initially seem. Bishop armed her poems with paradox, oxymorons, and strangely androgynous speakers in order to invite the reader to question his or her own ideas about poetry, feminism, and gender politics. Starting literally with the first poem in her first book, Bishop's work asks the reader to question not only their casual reading habits, but also the very ability of language to represent reality-a very deconstructive move for a poet who eschewed literary movements and manifestoes. ... Read more

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Elizabeth Bishop is considered one of the major American poets. She is so meticulous and original that she tends to be both under-read and misread. Examine her work through some of the best literary criticism available on poems such as "The Monument," "Roosters," "At the Fishhouses," "Crusoe in England," and "The End of March."

This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School. History’s greatest poets are covered in one series with expert analysis by Harold Bloom and other critics. These texts offer a wealth of information on the poets and their works that are most commonly read in high schools, colleges, and universities. ... Read more

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This illuminating study examines Elizabeth Bishop's rhetorical strategies and the way they shape the formal and thematic movements of her poetry and stories. Unlike other recent studies of Bishop, Doreski's does not concern itself primarily with her visual imagery, but rather deals with her poetry as a series of linguistic strategies designed to create the maximum illusion of representation while resisting the romantic devices of self-revelation and solipsistic narration. Doreski argues that Bishop takes advantage of the inadequacies of language, and with a postmodern sense of limitation explores the gaps and silences narrative must bridge with the mundane, the patently inadequate, leaving an air of emotional intimacy without committing itself to the banality of full exposure. This study finds the poems and stories mutually illuminating, but while moving back and forth among her various works, acknowledges the intelligent ordering of the volumes Bishop published in her lifetime. ... Read more

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A metronomic alternation of anecdote and response
In this work, L. Gluck shows the reader her true strong emotion, and the enthalpy of love. Her images are gripping -- sometimes stark and at other times lush and vibrant. Common to all her pieces is the ability to move the reader to feel emotion. Maybe it is a sudden gasp of revelation of connection or perhaps the moment comes later, when the poetry resurfaces from deep in memory. Beware, emotions will be evoked. ... Read more

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In the fall of 1998, Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, hosted a symposium on the life and work of Pulitzer prize-winning writer Elizabeth Bishop (1911 – 1979). This book collects 25 of the essays that were presented at the conference, as well as over 40 black and white reproductions of photographs relating to Bishop's life.

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This book examines the strategic possibilities of poetic self-restraint. Marianne Moore,Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson all wrote poetry that is marked by a certain reserve--precisely the motive against which most feminist poets and critics of the last thirty years have established themselves. Kirstin Hotelling Zona complicates this dichotomy by examining the conceptions of selfhood upon which it depends. She argues that Moore, Bishop, and Swenson expressed their commitment to feminism by exposing its most treasured assumptions: they not only challenge the ideal of autonomous self-definition, but also contest the integrity of a bodily or sexual authenticity by which that ideal is often measured.
In recent years critical studies of Bishop and Moore have flourished, a large percentage of them devoted to explorations of sexuality and gender. A gap is growing, however, between feminist repossessions of Moore and Bishop and recent readings of their antiessentialist poetics. On the one hand, these poets are appearing more frequently in the feminist canon, but the price of this inclusion is usually the suppression of their strategies of self-restraint. While Zona questions the poetic privileging of self-expression, she establishes contiguity between feminist poetry and developments in American poetry at large. In doing so she asserts the centrality of feminist poetry within discussions of contemporary American poetry, thereby challenging the common perception of feminist poetry as an "alternative" (which often means auxiliary) genre.
Kirstin Hotelling Zona is Assistant Professor of Poetry and Poetics, Illinois State University.
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Artfuland illuminating!
The world of poetic criticism is often murky.Having read and loved Elizabeth Bishop's poems, I was disappointed by much which literary critics have composed in regard to her fantastic work.However, Colwell's bookdoes a fantastic job of illuminating Bishop's individual poems in light ofher much larger opus--without sacrificing any of Bishop's artistic visionas so many others have done in an attempt to force the poems to"mean" a certain thing.Furthermore, Colwell's emphasis on howthe body constantly influenced Bishop's poetic vision has not only promptedme to reread Bishop in a new way, but also has prompted me to reread manyof the poets by whom Bishop was influenced, and thus gain a newunderstanding of their work as well.

beautiful!
Elizabeth Bishop's poems are amazing! very tought provoking. Buy this book if you're a fan of Elizabeth Bishop, you wont regret it. it's well worth your money! ... Read more

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