| Elizabeth Bishop |
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EARLY LIFE Greatly influenced by Marianne Moore , and a good friend of the poet Robert Lowell and James Merrill , Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts . After her father's death and her mother's institutionalization, Elizabeth Bishop lived with her Canadian grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia for a few years, and later with her father's family in Boston, Massachusetts . She attended Walnut Hill School , and entered Vassar College in the fall of 1929, the year of the stock market crash. She graduated from college in 1934 , having befriended writer Mary McCarthy (who was one year her senior). She wrote the poem '' Visits To St. Elizabeth's '' in 1950 as a recollection of visits to Ezra Pound when he was confined there. WORK Elizabeth Bishop was awarded the Houghton Mifflin poetry award in 1946 and, in 1956, the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of poetry, ''North & South - A Cold Spring''. She later received the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award , as well as two Guggenheim fellowships. In 1976, she became the first woman to receive the International Neustadt Prize For Literature , and remains the only American to be awarded that prize. {Link without Title} Bishop often contributed articles to '' The New Yorker '', and, in 1964, wrote the obituary for Flannery O'Connor in '' The New York Review Of Books ''. Bishop lectured in higher education for a number of years. For a short time she taught at the University Of Washington , before moving to Harvard for seven years. She also taught at New York University , before finishing at the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology . Early in her career, Bishop was regarded (and perhaps dismissed) as a "miniaturist," a master of small poetic structures and descriptive detail. Careful reading of her work, however, reveals a sharp confessional edge: her life story is told through poems which, though nominally addressing and describing other subject matter (including paintings, tourist destinations, etc.), in fact speak to true events (and to her, and the reader's, underlying existential states). She published very little work, more for her perfectionism than lack of offers. Despite her prominence in 20th century American poetry, her ''Complete Poems'' is a relatively slim volume. WORKS Poetry:
Individual poems:
Other works:
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