Elizabeth Bishop

This is a new reading of this intensely private 20th century American poet's work. Linda Anderson explores Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, from her early days at Vassar College to her last great poems in Geography III and the later uncollected poems. Drawing generously on Bishop's notebooks and letters, the book situates Bishop both in her historical and cultural context and in terms of her own writing process, where the years between beginning a poem and completing it, for which Bishop is legendary, are seen as a necessary part of their composition. The book begins by offering a new reading of Bishop's relationship with Marianne Moore and with modernism. The book also follows the way Bishop came back to memories of her childhood, developing ideas about narrative, in order to explore time, both the losses it demands and the connections it makes possible. The lines of connections are both those between Bishop and her contemporaries and her context and those she inscribed through her own work, suggesting how her poems incorporate a process of arrival and create new possibilities of meaning. It draws on archival and historical material. It provides readings of Bishop's major poetry and prose in context. It draws on psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory. It connects the poems with their process of composition. In the years since her death in 1979 Elizabeth Bishop has become one of the the most beloved poet in the American canon and this insighful book shows us why.