Elizabeth Bishop 1911 - 1979

A poet of observation, not of personal relationships, Bishop writes of the "Sandpiper," a bird seen running on the beach while it intently watches grains of sand. Bishop paints minutia of nature visible on land and sea. Her power to see was not the fruit of a life without pain. Her father died but mere months after her own birth-in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1921. Her mother was confined to a mental hospital when Elizabeth was only five, and she never saw her again.

After living with her father's parents, Bishop met Marianne Moore, who encouraged publication of her early poems written when she studied at Vassar College. Later, when living in New York, she became a close friend of Robert Lowell. Then Bishop was a consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress. When she lived in Florida for seven years, Bishop completed her first book of poems, North and South-A Spring (1955). It won the Pulitzer Prize.

Following her life-steadying lesbian love relation with Lota de Macedo Soares throughout their years together in Brazil, Bishop returned to America after Lota's suicide. She became poet-in-residence at Harvard in 1969. Her Complete Poems won the National Book Award in 1970.

A new source of strength for the rest of Bishop's life was her new partner, Alice Methfessel. Elizabeth Bishop taught at Harvard until death in her Boston apartment of a cerebral aneurism in 1979.