Treasured for spare elegance, imagery, and precise language, Elizabeth Bishop revealed her thoughts to readers through regular poetry submissions to The New Yorker magazine. She was skilled at dreamy fantasy and detachment as well as solid description, and she filled her work with the places and emotional states that marked a life much influenced by nomadic travel, lesbianism, depression, and alcohol. In addition to poetry collections, she produced a musical score, juvenile verse, and translations of the poems of Octavio Paz. She also introduced the English-speaking world to Brazilian poetry.
Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts. The instability of her childhood derived from the death of her father from kidney failure when she was eight months old and the permanent committal of her mother to an asylum five years later. From that point on, Bishop never saw her mother again. Deprived of interaction with her peers, she grew up among adult relatives.
Placed with maternal grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia, Bishop attended a one-room school at age six. Her elementary education was sporadic because of frequent attacks of asthma, bronchitis, and eczema. She then returned to Worcester and lived with an aunt while attending two Massachusetts boarding schools: North Shore Country Day School in Swampscott and Walnut Hill School in Nantick. At both schools, she published in student newspapers and composed poems and skits for class performance.
