Elizabeth Bishop, Lonely and Dedicated
Scott Bradfield,"It’s Always a Good Time to Revisit the Brilliance of Elizabeth Bishop" (A Review of Thomas Travisano, Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop), The Washington Post, November 8, 2019:
- Her loneliness: “When you write my epitaph,” she once told her lifelong friend, Robert
Lowell, “you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”
- Her talent: James Merrill once claimed she “had more talent for life — and for poetry — than anyone else I’ve ever known.”
- Her secrecy: It is hard to think of a major American poet who revealed so little about herself while revealing so much about the human world we inhabit. Through about 100 poems published during her lifetime, Elizabeth Bishop — in her compact, reticent, nearly invisible way — contained multitudes. [...] “You know what I want?” she once asked her friend, Richard Howard. “I
want closets, closets, and more closets.” There was something secret
about every poem she composed, like a private space that you only slowly
found your way into. And one that never made you eager to leave.
- Her literary method: Most of all, Bishop never lacked the luxury of time, working for years and even decades on individual poems until she got them just right. There was a dogged pertinacity to the way she composed poems, relentlessly hunting down every perfect word and nuance, often assembling her lines on a large bulletin board over her desk, like one of those serial killer-hunting detectives in a television series.
