Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)

 

His beak is focused; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.

Poor bird, he is obsessed!

The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,

mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

—from “Sandpiper”

 

“Yes, all my life I have lived and behaved very much like that sandpiper—just running along the edges of different countries, ‘looking for something,’” Elizabeth Bishop said in 1976, upon receiving the Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Born on February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts, Bishop’s childhood was marked by loneliness and displacement. By the time she was five, she had lost both her parents: her father died when she was eight months old, and her mother was later committed to a mental asylum. As a child, Elizabeth moved often: at age six she was taken from her maternal grandparents’ farm in Nova Scotia to her paternal grandparents’ house in Worcester; later she was rescued by her Aunt Maude, who brought Elizabeth to live in Boston. For two years she attended boarding school in Massachusetts, before entering Vassar College in 1929.

Throughout her life, Bishop relocated frequently, as if searching for an elusive sense of home. After graduating from Vassar in 1934, she lived in New York, Europe, and Key West, Florida. She was a master at the art of letter writing, and kept up lively correspondences with her friend and mentor Marianne Moore, as well as her close friend Robert Lowell, whom she met in 1947.

In 1950, Bishop embarked on a trip to South America, where a near-fatal encounter with a cashew nut changed the course of her life. While recovering from a severe allergic reaction to the nut, she fell in love with Lota de Macedo Soares, and ended up living with Lota in Brazil for the next 15 years. She returned to the U.S. in 1966, as poet in residence at the University of Washington, and in 1970 began teaching at Harvard, where she stayed until her death in 1979.

“She had a great ear, but better than that, eyes,” Octavio Paz has said of Bishop’s poems. She enjoyed painting, and her poems are full of the rich visual landscapes she encountered in her travels. But with equal precision, Bishop’s poems convey the emotional perspective of the outsider. In poems like “The Pink Dog,” the speaker identifies with the outcast; even in poems about her childhood, such as “In the Waiting Room,” the child experiences a sense of estrangement from her own identity.

There was something of the “obsessed” sandpiper in Bishop’s writing process as well — she was extremely meticulous, and some poems, like “The Moose,” took her twenty years to complete. But it was in poetry that she did finally find a home, with a masterful voice that is at once formal and witty, practical and cosmic, cool yet passionate.