Elizabeth Bishop Research Paper

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Elizabeth Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts and died on October 6, 1979. When she was less than a year old, her father died, and shortly thereafter, her mother was committed to a mental asylum. Bishop was first sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia and later lived with paternal relatives in Worcester and South Boston. After a childhood and adolescence marked by asthma and other psychic and bodily ailments, as well as frequent domestic removals and changes of caregiver, Bishop finally made it to a good preparatory school and then, with family help, to Vassar College. She also found her life mentor, Marianne Moore, in Vassar College. Bishop had an independent income in early adulthood, as a result of an inheritance from her deceased father, that did not run out until the end of her life. With this inheritance, Bishop was able to travel widely with a violent aimlessness through France, England, Ireland, Mexico, Morocco, Key West, and elsewhere without worrying about employment. She wrote frequently about her love of travel in poems like “Questions of Travel” and “Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance.” (famouspoetsandpoems.com) …show more content…

Her first book, North & South, won the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Award for 1946. In 1955, she received the Pulitzer Prize for a volume containing North & South and A Cold Spring. Her next book of poetry, Questions of Travel (1965), won the National Book Award and was followed by The Complete Poems in 1969. Geography III (1976) received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1976, Miss Bishop became both the first American and the first woman to win the Books Abroad/Neustadt Prize for Literature.

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