Elizabeth Bishop

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1956.

Quotes

North & South (1946)

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

The armored cars of dreams contrived to let us do
so many a dangerous thing.

• This iceberg cuts its facets from within.
  Like jewelry from a grave
  it saves itself perpetually and adorns
  Only itself.
  • "The Imaginary Iceberg", st. 3

• Icebergs behoove the soul
  (both being self-made from elements least visible)
  to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected, indivisible.
  • "The Imaginary Iceberg", st. 3

•    Until everything
  was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
  And I let the fish go.
  • "The Fish"

• Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West.
  More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.
  • "The Map"

• The armored cars of dreams contrived to let us do
  so many a dangerous thing.
  • "Sleeping Standing Up"

• From a magician's midnight sleeve
  the radio-singers
  distribute all their love-songs
  over the dew-wet lawns.
  • "Late Air". First published in Partisan Review, vol. 5, no. 3 (Aug.–Sep. 1938), p. 64

Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring (1955)

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

• Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
  element bearable to no mortal,
  to fish and to seals...
  • "At the Fishhouses"

• It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
  dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
  drawn from the cold hard mouth
  of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
  forever, flowing and drawn, and since
  our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
  • "At the Fishhouses"

• The big fish tubs are completely lined
  with layers of beautiful herring scales
  and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
  with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
  with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
  • "At the Fishhouses"

• From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
  please come flying.
  • "Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore"

Questions of Travel (1965)

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

•    Should we have stayed at home,
  wherever that may be?
  • "Questions of Travel". First published in The New Yorker (Jan. 14, 1956)

• Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
  The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
  and the child draws another inscrutable house.
  • "Sestina". First published in The New Yorker (Sep. 15, 1956)

• The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
  Hastily, all alone,
  a glistening armadillo left the scene,
  rose-flecked, head down, tail down.
  • "The Armadillo"

•    The staring sailor
  that shakes his watch
  that tells the time
  of the poet, the man
  that lies in the house of Bedlam.
  • "Visits to St. Elizabeths", st. 11

•   Somebody embroidered the doily.
  Somebody waters the plant,
  or oils it, maybe. Somebody
  arranges the rows of cans […]
  Somebody loves us all.
  • Filling Station

Geography III (1976)

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

• I knew that nothing stranger
  had ever happened.
  • "In the Waiting Room"

• Why should I be my aunt,
  or me, or anyone?
  What similarities—
  boots, hands, the family voice
  I felt in my throat, or even
  the National Geographic
  and those awful hanging breasts—
  held us all together
  or made us all just one?
  • "In the Waiting Room"

• How had I come to be here
  like them, and overhear
  a cry of pain that could have
  got loud and worse but hadn’t?
  • "In the Waiting Room"

• Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?
  • "Crusoe in England"

•    I’d have
  nightmares of other islands
  stretching away from mine, infinities
  of islands, islands spawning islands
  like frogs’ eggs turning into polliwogs
  of islands, knowing that I had to live
  on each and every one, eventually,
  for ages, registering their flora,
  their fauna, their geography.
  • "Crusoe in England"

• And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles
  seventeen years ago come March.
  • "Crusoe in England"

• The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
  so many things seem filled with the intent
  to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
  Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
  of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
  The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
  • "One Art". Also in The New Yorker (Apr. 26, 1976)

• Life and the memory of it so compressed
  they've turned into each other.
  • "Poem"

Quotes about Bishop

• I love Elizabeth Bishop, and I think that in Latin America she's really well known. I think she's much more well known than Lowell, I think because of her experience in Brazil...I think that Brazil allowed Elizabeth Bishop to be herself.
  • Marjorie Agosín, Interview, blackbird.vcu.edu (2004)

• I had felt drawn, but also repelled, by Bishop's early work—I mean repel in the sense of refusing access, seeming to push away. In part, my difficulties with her were difficulties in the poetry, of Bishop as a young poet finding her own level and her own language. But in part they were difficulties I brought with me, as a still younger woman poet already beginning to question sexual identity, looking for a female genealogy, still not yet consciously lesbian. I had not then connected the themes of outsiderhood and marginality in her work, as well as its encodings and obscurities, with a lesbian identity. I was looking for a clear female tradition; the tradition I was discovering was diffuse, elusive, often cryptic. Yet, especially given the times and customs of the 1940s and 1950s, Bishop's work now seems to me remarkably honest and courageous. Women poets searching for older contemporaries in that period were supposed to look to "Miss" Marianne Moore as the paradigm of what a woman poet might accomplish, and, after her, to "Miss" Bishop. Both had been selected and certified by the literary establishment, which was, as now, white, male, and at least ostensibly heterosexual. Elizabeth Bishop's name was spoken, her books reviewed with deep respect. But attention was paid to her triumphs, her perfections, not to her struggles for self-definition and her sense of difference. In this way, her reputation made her less, rather than more, available to me. The infrequency of her public appearances and her geographic remoteness-living for many years in Brazil, with a woman as it happened, but we didn't know that-made her an indistinct and a problematic life model for a woman poet.
  • Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986)

• Until recently this female anger and this furious awareness of the Man's power over her were not available materials to the female poet, who tended to write of Love as the source of her suffering, and to view that victimization by Love as an almost inevitable fate. Or, like Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, she kept sexuality at a measured and chiseled distance in her poems.
  • Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence (1979)