Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop There are many fantastic poets out there today and there were many in the past. One of these many great poets is Elizabeth Bishop. She started writing poems in 1946 and stopped in 1979. Her poems were very imaginative yet serious and sophisticated at the same time. Each poet has their own way to write, and this is hers. Elizabeth Bishop was born on February 8, 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Only a few months after Bishop was born, her father passed away and because of this, her mother suffered from a mental breakdown and was admitted into an insane asylum in Nova Scotia until she passed away in 1934. At the age of six Elizabeth Bishop was taken to live with her grandparents back in Worcester. She then began to be frequently ill, so to give her a ‘happier surrounding’, she moved in with her aunt in Boston. At this age, 8, is when she started to read poetry and fairy tales. Walt Whitman and Gerard Manley Hopkins were her favorite and most inspirational poets at the time. As Elizabeth Bishop grew older she started to choose her career path. At the age of 16 she was admitted to a boarding school in Natick, Massachusettes where she read and studied the works of William Shakespeare and English Romantic poets. One year she tried to study music but then realized that she is terrified of recitals so she quickly dropped that dream and she returned to literature. Along with Mary McCarthy and Eleanor Clark, Elizabeth Bishop founded a literary review, this was where Bishop’s very first poem was published. Then later in the Vassar Review, many pieces of her work were being published but during this time her writing skills were affected to a heavy drinking problem. After Bishop’s problem was solved, she went back to creating great poems, with help of the greatest poetic mentor in Bishop’s early years, Marianne Moore. Moore helped Bishop write more poems and write her first volume, North and South(1946), which was chosen for the Houghton Mifflin Poetry