Elizabeth Bishop

Despite numerous attempts to write poems specifically about the deteriorating political and economic situation in Brazil, Elizabeth Bishop found that she could not. Instead, it is in poems such as "Twelfth Morning" and the only other Brazil poem she was able to complete for Questions of Travel, "The Burglar of Babylon" (1964), that such things get said. The latter poem is a faux naif ballad about a real-life manhunt conducted on the impoverished and favela-covered hillsides of Rio, in full view of the balconies of the wealthy. The poem's rigid structure and childish rhyme scheme gave Bishop a license to deal in political generalizations she could not make convincing in her own voice. Its bare facts and its imaginative entry into the consciousness of Micucu, an individual product of the unjust Brazilian economic system, seemed to her the best way to express her political message. She had learned this lesson in the use of popular forms from the Rio Samba schools, which each year made songs of current events to be sung at Carnival. Questions of Travel was a thin volume, and the publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, decided to solve that problem by including the whole of the prose poem/memoir "In the Village" between the "Brazil" and "Elsewhere" sections of the book. This turned the book in a sharply autobiographical direction, but the inclusion of a prose memoir in a book of poems had precedent in Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959). You may also note in your research paper that Bishop had been thinking about autobiography in the year before the book appeared as well; the poet Anne Stevenson was writing a book about her for the Twayne U.S. Authors Series. Quite surprisingly and for the first time, Bishop was sharing the facts of her childhood and her thinking about poetry in a systematic way. The letters she wrote to Stevenson in 1964-1965 are extraordinary autobiographical documents; the closest Bishop came to a full consideration of how the circumstances of her life affected her poems. When the reviews of Questions of Travel began to appear in the spring of 1966, Bishop was in the United States, having taken on the first teaching job of her life. At the University of Washington in Seattle she taught poetry and creative writing. Bishop had left Brazil badly in need of a break from the constant struggles of life in Rio and from the terrifying intensity with which Lota Soares worked at her job. Also before her departure, Bishop had purchased an eighteenth-century house in Ouro Preto, in the state of Minas Gerais, and she was suddenly in need of money to fund its renovation.

The job at the University of Washington terrified her; she had never worked for a living; she had been out of the country for fifteen years, and all of the transformations of the 1960s were new to her. But she found that she was able to do it, especially with the help of good friends. Early in her stay in Seattle, Bishop fell in love with a young woman, and with that relationship her Brazilian life began to fall apart. Bishop's life improved from the moment she arrived at Harvard. Though she sometimes bristled at the conservatism and sexism of the institution, she found a circle of writer/friends - including not only Lowell, but Seamus Heaney, Octavio Paz, John Malcolm Brinnin, Frank Bidart, Lloyd Schwartz, James Merrill, Robert Fitzgerald, and her editor, Robert Giroux. She also found a devoted friend and caretaker in Alice Methfessel, the young administrative assistant at Harvard's Kirkland House, where Bishop first lived in Cambridge. Bishop continued to struggle in the last years of her life with depression, asthma, and alcoholism and their attendant health concerns; but she lived well. She taught her courses, socialized, and renovated an apartment on Boston's Lewis Wharf to live in, spent summers traveling with Methfessel - including trips back to Ouro Preto, the Galapagos Islands, Scandinavia, and Greece - and, after 1974, spent a part of each summer on North Haven Island, Maine, which became her spiritual home. She wrote only six new poems in her last nine years - "Night City" (1972), "The End of March" (1975), "Five Flights Up" (1975), "One Art" (1976), "North Haven" (1978), and "Sonnet" (1979). These and the older poems she was able to finish - "Crusoe in England" (1971), "In the Waiting Room" (1971), "The Moose" (1972), "Poem" (1972), "12 O'Clock News" (1973), "Santarem" (1978), and "Pink Dog" (1979) - extended her range and reputation dramatically. She also published several translations, notably of Octavio Paz's "Primero Enero" ("January First," 1975) and "Objetos y Apariciones" ("Objects and Apparitions," 1974). To find out more on Elizabeth Bishop and her poems, do not hesitate to order a custom essay.