Biography

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 8, 1911 (Poets.org). When Bishop was only a year old, her father passed away, and her mother was admitted to a mental asylum a few years after (Poets.org). With no one to take care of her, Bishop's maternal grandparents had her live with them in Canada, but her paternal grandparents became concerned about the limited access to education in Nova Scotia, and had her live with them back in Massachusetts (Poetry Foundation). While in her paternal grandparents' care, she attended Walnut Hills School for Girls and later attended Vassar College (Poetry Foundation).

Bishop originally wanted to major in music composition and piano, but found it to be stressful and instead studied English (Biography). While at Vassar, she made a long-lasting friendship with Marianne Moore, a fellow poet who had a strong impact on Bishop's writing. While she worked on the school news paper, "The Vassar Miscellary", she co-founded "Con Spirito" with her fellow friends and peers at Vassar. Her years at Vassar were incredibly important to her, as her writing skills were developed and she made a lasting legacy at the college (Poetry Foundation).

Once she graduated, Bishop traveled to Europe and visited France, Spain, North Africa, Ireland, and Italy from 1935 to 1937 (Poets.org). She wrote many poems influenced by her travels through Europe, before eventually settling down in Key West, Florida. There, she wrote her first poetry book North and South before she moved to Brazil for 14 years (Poetry Foundation). In Brazil she met her girlfriend, Lota de Macedo Soares, who she grew very close to and loved dearly. Unfortunately, Soares committed suicide, and Bishop moved around to New York and San Francisco before finally moving back to Massachusetts (Poetry Foundation).

When she settled back in her home state, she was offered a job teaching at Harvard among many other teaching jobs at other universities (Biography). She worked at Harvard for 7 years, starting in 1970, where she left a major impact on her students (Poetry.org).Bishop's work is what truly made the biggest impact in her career as a poet. In her lifetime, Elizabeth only published 101 of her poems (Poetry Foundation). She became a Poet Laureate of the United States in 1949 to 1950; her first book North and South | A Cold Spring won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, but her awards don't stop there (Biography). In 1965, her book Questions of Travel won the National Book Award; in 1976 her book Geography III won the National Book Critics Circle Award; in 1976 she also became the first woman to win the Neustadt Prize; and after being awarded an Academy Fellowship in 1964, she served as a Chencellor from 1966 to 1979 (Biography; Poets.org). With such an impressive list of awards and accomplishments, she was, and still is, hailed as an important figure in literature and poetry.

Her reputation preceded her well after death as well. Elizabeth Bishop passed away on October 6, 1979 in Boston, Massachusetts. Many poets and critics to this day still look up to her and study her expressive and beautiful work (Poets.org).