33 Facts About Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer.

Elizabeth Bishop was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976.

Elizabeth Bishop's mother remained in an asylum until her death in 1934, and the two were never reunited.

Elizabeth Bishop was removed from the care of her grandparents and moved in with her father's wealthier family in Worcester, Massachusetts.

However, Elizabeth Bishop was unhappy there, and her separation from her maternal grandparents made her lonely.

In 1918, her grandparents, realizing that Elizabeth Bishop was unhappy living with them, sent her to live with her mother's eldest sister, Maude Bulmer Shepherdson, and her husband George.

Elizabeth Bishop was very ill as a child and, as a result, received very little formal schooling until she attended Saugus High School for her freshman year.

Elizabeth Bishop was accepted to the Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts, for her sophomore year but was behind on her vaccinations and not allowed to attend.

Elizabeth Bishop then boarded at the Walnut Hill School, where she studied music.

Elizabeth Bishop gave up music because of a terror of performance and switched to English where she took courses including 16th and 17th century literature and the novel.

Elizabeth Bishop published her work in her senior year in The Magazine.

Elizabeth Bishop graduated from Vassar with a bachelor's degree in 1934.

Elizabeth Bishop was greatly influenced by the poet Marianne Moore, to whom she was introduced by a librarian at Vassar in 1934.

Elizabeth Bishop was introduced to Robert Lowell by Randall Jarrell in 1947, and they became great friends, mostly through their written correspondence, until Lowell's death in 1977.

Elizabeth Bishop had an independent income from early adulthood, as a result of an inheritance from her deceased father, that did not run out until near the end of her life.

Elizabeth Bishop wrote frequently about her love of travel in poems like "Questions of Travel" and "Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance".

Elizabeth Bishop lived in France for several years in the mid-1930s with a friend from Vassar, Louise Crane, who was a paper-manufacturing heiress.

Elizabeth Bishop later lived in an apartment at 611 Frances Street.

Elizabeth Bishop lived in Petropolis with architect Lota de Macedo Soares, who was descended from a prominent and notable political family.

Elizabeth Bishop was influenced by Brazilian poets, including Joao Cabral de Melo Neto and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and translated their work into English.

Elizabeth Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize for this book in 1956.

Where some of her notable contemporaries like Robert Lowell and John Berryman made the intimate details of their personal lives an important part of their poetry, Elizabeth Bishop avoided this practice altogether.

Elizabeth Bishop used discretion when writing about details and people from her life.

Elizabeth Bishop did not see herself as a "lesbian poet" or as a "female poet".

Elizabeth Bishop wanted nothing to do with anything that seemed to involve the women's movement.

Elizabeth Bishop internalized many of the male attitudes of the day toward women, who were supposed to be attractive, appealing to men, and not ask for equal pay or a job with benefits.

Elizabeth Bishop combines reality and imagination, a technique used in her poem "Sestina".

Elizabeth Bishop is widely known for her skill in the sestina format.

Elizabeth Bishop lectured in higher education for a number of years starting in the 1970s when her inheritance began to run out.

Elizabeth Bishop spent several summers near the end of her life on the island of North Haven, Maine.

Elizabeth Bishop taught at New York University, before finishing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1971 Elizabeth Bishop began a relationship with Alice Methfessel, who became her literary executor.

Never a prolific writer, Elizabeth Bishop noted that she would begin many projects and leave them unfinished.