Overview

Elizabeth Bishop is a poet who did not adhere to a single geographical center or school of poetry (modernism, symbolism, surrealism, confessional, post-modernism, etc.). Her poems explore her native ground (Nova Scotia and Massachusetts) and the places to which she traveled and lived for periods of time: Paris, Key West, Brazil, and New York. Bishop also worked across genres: poetry, essays, stories, and letters. Her relatively slim collection of poems is as eclectic as her life: she wrote both in free verse and conventional forms, and the subjects of her poems are wide-ranging: sea poems, city poems, poems of remembrance, political poems, poems of the north and poems of the south.  

To grasp Bishop’s range as a poet, and to understand how writers might approach Bishop’s poetry, we will focus on Bishop’s versatility of form: those poems written in conventional verse forms, such as “Sestina,” Sandpiper,” and “One Art.” We will also look closely at Bishop’s unusual musicality in poems that seem to bridge the divide between verse and prose poetry with a more detailed analysis of “At the Fishhouses” and “The End of March.”