Who is Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Dwight Garner argued that she was perhaps "the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century".

Early life

Bishop, an only child, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to William Thomas and Gertrude May (Bulmer) Bishop. After her father, a successful builder, died when she was eight months old, Bishop's mother became mentally ill and was institutionalized in 1916. (Bishop would later write about the time of her mother's struggles in h...
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Elizabeth Bishop Poems

  • In The Waiting Room
    In Worcester, Massachusetts,
    I went with Aunt Consuelo
    to keep her dentist's appointment
    and sat and waited for her ...
  • Lullaby For The Cat
    Minnow, go to sleep and dream,
    Close your great big eyes;
    Round your bed Events prepare
    The pleasantest surprise. ...
  • Sonnet (1928)
    I am in need of music that would flow
    Over my fretful, feeling finger-tips,
    Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
    With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow. ...
  • O Breath
    Beneath that loved   and celebrated breast,
    silent, bored really   blindly veined,
    grieves, maybe   lives and lets
    live, passes   bets, ...
  • The Fish
    I caught a tremendous fish
    and held him beside the boat
    half out of water, with my hook
    fast in a corner of his mouth. ...
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Top 10 most used topics by Elizabeth Bishop

Black 25 White 24 Water 24 Light 24 Dark 22 Green 20 Sea 19 Blue 19 Long 18 Away 18


Elizabeth Bishop Quotes

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Comments about Elizabeth Bishop

Kropotkin57: the end of march elizabeth bishop, 1975
Cureforpain1993: elizabeth bishop, "filling station" (1979)
Twc_org: new in the magazine: "listening to the work: in praise of listening." "writing takes time . . . what elizabeth bishop once described as 'a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.'" read "listening to the work" in the magazine:
Riana977353361: bishop o'connell vs. elizabeth seton - virginia high school softball
Heyabbiek: why the extraneous plant? why the taboret? why, oh why, the doily? tell us, elizabeth bishop. (the recording of her reading is so charming.)
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Poem of the day

Edgar Albert Guest Poem
The Killing Place
 by Edgar Albert Guest

We're hiking along at a two-forty pace
We 're making life seem like a man-killing race,
With our nerves all on edge and our jaws firmly set
We go rushing along; with our brows lined with sweat
And our cheeks pale and drawn every minute we dash,
And the goal that we 're after is merely more cash.

We 're out for the money, the greenbacks and gold,
...

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