Love Unknown
The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
An illuminating new biography of one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Bishop
"Love Unknown points movingly to the many relationships that moored Bishop, keeping her together even as life—and her own self-destructive tendencies—threatened to split her apart.” —The Wall Street Journal
Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that "Elizabeth had more talent for life—and for poetry—than anyone else I've known." This new biography reveals just how she learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters—a remarkable body of work that would make her one of America's most beloved and celebrated poets. In Love Unknown, Thomas Travisano, founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, tells the story of the famous poet and traveler's life.
Bishop moved through extraordinary mid-twentieth century worlds with relationships among an extensive international array of literati, visual artists, musicians, scholars, and politicians—along with a cosmopolitan gay underground that was then nearly invisible to the dominant culture. Drawing on fresh interviews and newly discovered manuscript materials, Travisano illuminates that the "art of losing" that Bishop celebrated with such poignant irony in her poem, "One Art," perhaps her most famous, was linked in equal part to an "art of finding," that Bishop's art and life was devoted to the sort of encounters and epiphanies that so often appear in her work.
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Drawing on an extraordinary level of archival access, Travisano (editor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell), a professor emeritus of English at Hartwick College, offers a definitive biography cum literary study of Elizabeth Bishop (1911 1979). As Travisano asserts, even "her more elusive or enigmatic poems... seem almost transparent when biographical insights are sensitively applied." Familial traumas (her father's death when she was an infant and her mother's struggles with mental illness) and a disrupted childhood spent being passed among various relatives found reflection in poems such as "Sestina," which describes her realization that her mother had been institutionalized. Travisano follows Bishop's career through her earliest juvenilia; her blossoming years at Vassar (1929 1934); her friendships with other poets, such as Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell; and her many travels most significantly, the intended two-week stay in Brazil that stretched into 14 years, chronicled in the major work Questions of Travel (1965). Travisano also tracks Bishop's accumulating honors a 1946 Guggenheim Fellowship, 1956 Pulitzer Prize, and 1970 National Book Award and deepening renown among her peers. Explaining how a writer who published barely a hundred poems during her lifetime left a lasting imprint on later generations of poets, Travisano's essential volume illuminates Bishop's life and, most valuably, her work.
