Back Poems, Prose, & Letters

Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, & Letters

Edited by Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz

“Bishop’s work is deeply compassionate and necessary reading, and now almost all of it can be found in one place.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Interviews Love unknown: Thomas Travisano on the life and worlds of Elizabeth Bishop
August 21, 2020

James Merrill described Elizabeth Bishop’s poems as “more wryly radiant, more touching, more unaffectedly intelligent than any written in our lifetime” and called her “our greatest national treasure.” Robert Lowell said, “I enjoy her poems more than anybody else’s.” Long before a wider public was aware of Bishop’s work, her fellow poets expressed astonished admiration of her formal rigor, fiercely observant eye, emotional intimacy, and sometimes eccentric flights of imagination. Today she is recognized as one of America’s great poets of the twentieth century.

This unprecedented collection offers a full-scale presentation of a writer of startling originality, at once passionate and reticent, adventurous and perfectionist. It presents all the poetry that Elizabeth Bishop published in her lifetime, in such classic volumes as North & South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel, and Geography III. In addition it contains an extensive selection of unpublished poems and drafts of poems (several not previously collected), as well as all her published poetic translations, ranging from a chorus from Aristophanes’ The Birds to versions of Brazilian sambas.

Poems, Prose, and Letters also brings together most of her published prose writings, including stories; reminiscences; travel writing about the places (Nova Scotia, Florida, Brazil) that so profoundly marked her poetry; and literary essays and statements, including a number of pieces published here for the first time. The book is rounded out with a selection of Bishop’s irresistibly engaging and self-revelatory letters. Of the 53 letters included here, written between 1933 and 1979, a considerable number are printed for the first time, and all are presented in their entirety. Their recipients include Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, Anne Stevenson, May Swenson, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

Robert Giroux, volume co-editor, was chairman of the editorial board of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Elizabeth Bishop’s longtime editor. He edited her Collected Prose (1984) and One Art (1994), her selected letters. Lloyd Schwartz, co-editor, is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, former classical music editor of The Boston Phoenix, a regular reviewer for NPR’s Fresh Air, and co-editor of Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. In 1994 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. His most recent poetry collection is Little Kisses.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, & Letters is kept in print by a gift from Deborah and Jason McManus to the Guardians of American Letters Fund, made in honor of Sophie McManus.
Table of Contents

North & South
The Map
The Imaginary Iceberg
Casabianca
The Colder the Air
Wading at Wellfleet
Chemin de Fer
The Gentleman of Shalott
Large Bad Picture
From the Country to the City
The Man-Moth
Love Lies Sleeping
A Miracle for Breakfast
The Weed
The Unbeliever
The Monument
Paris, 7 a.m.
Quai d’Orleans
Sleeping on the Ceiling
Sleeping Standing Up
Cirque d’Hiver
Florida
Jerónimo’s House
Roosters
Seascape
Little Exercise
The Fish
Late Air
Cootchie
Songs for a Colored Singer
Anaphora

A Cold Spring
A Cold Spring
Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance
The Bight
A Summer’s Dream
Cape Breton
At the Fishhouses
View of The Capitol from The Library of Congress
Insomnia
The Prodigal
Faustina, or Rock Roses
Varick Street
Four Poems
Argument
Letter to N.Y.
The Mountain
Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore
Arrival at Santos
The Shampoo

Questions of Travel
I. Brazil
Arrival at Santos
Brazil, January 1, 1502
Questions of Travel
Squatter’s Children
Manuelzinho
Electrical Storm
Song for the Rainy Season
The Armadillo
The Riverman
Twelfth Morning; or What You Will
The Burglar of Babylon
II. Elsewhere
In the Village
Manners
Sestina
First Death in Nova Scotia
Filling Station
Sunday, 4 a.m.
Sandpiper
From Trollope’s Journal
Visits to St. Elizabeths

From The Complete Poems
Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics
The Hanging of the Mouse
Some Dreams They Forgot
Song
House Guest
Trouvée
Going to the Bakery
Under the Window: Ouro Preto

Geography III
In the Waiting Room
Crusoe in England
Night City
The Moose
12 O’Clock News
Poem
One Art
The End of March
Objects & Apparitions
Five Flights Up

Late Poems
Santarém
North Haven
Pink Dog
Sonnet

Uncollected Poems
The Ballad of the Subway Train
Behind Stowe
To a Tree
Thunder
Sonnet
Imber Nocturnus
For C.W.B.
The Wave
Dead
A Word with You
The Flood
Hymn to the Virgin
Three Sonnets for the Eyes
Three Valentines
The Reprimand
The Wit
Exchanging Hats
A Norther—Key West
Thank-You Note

Unpublished Poems and Drafts

Translations
Aristophanes
From The Birds
Max Jacob
Rainbow
Patience of an Angel
Banks
Hell Is Graduated
Manuel Bandeira
My Last Poem
Brazilian Tragedy
João Cabral de Melo Neto
From The Death and Life of a Severino
Joaquim Cardozo
Cemetery of Childhood
Elegy for Maria Alves
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Seven-Sided Poem
Don’t Kill Yourself
Travelling in the Family
The Table
Infancy
In the Middle of the Road
Family Portrait
Vinícius de Moraes
Sonnet of Intimacy
Four Sambas
“Rio de Janeiro”
“Kick him out of office!”
“Marshál, Illustrious Marshál,”
“Come, my mulatta”
Chico Buarque de Hollanda
A Banda
Stories by Clarice Lispector
The Smallest Woman in the World
A Hen
Marmosets
Octavio Paz
The Key of Water
Along Galeana Street
The Grove
January First

Personal Essays, Reminiscences, and Reporting
Roof-Tops,
On Being Alone
A Mouse and Mice
Gregorio Valdes, 1879–1939
Mercedes Hospital
Introduction to The Diary of “Helena Morley”
A New Capital, Aldous Huxley, and Some Indians
Primer Class
The Country Mouse
A Warm and Reasonable People
On the Railroad Named Delight
The U.S.A. School of Writing
A Trip to Vigia
Wesley Wehr
Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore
To the Botequim & Back

Stories
A Flight of Fancy
The Thumb
Then Came the Poor
Chimney Sweepers
Seven-Days Monologue
Mr. Pope’s Garden
The Last Animal
Was It in His Hand?
The Baptism
The Sea and Its Shore
In Prison
The Farmer’s Children
The Housekeeper
Gwendolyn
Memories of Uncle Neddy

Literary Statements and Reviews
In Appreciation of Shelley’s Poems
The Buck in the Snow by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Time’s Andromedas
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Notes on Timing in His Poetry
Journey to the End of Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Dimensions for a Novel
As We Like It: Miss Moore and the Delight of Imitation
It All Depends
Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks
XAIPE by E. E. Cummings
Love from Emily: Emily Dickinson’s Letters
What the Young Man Said to the Psalmist: Wallace Fowlie
The Manipulation of Mirrors: Jules Laforgue
“I Was But Just Awake”: Walter de la Mare
“Writing poetry is an unnatural act . . .”
Blurb for Life Studies by Robert Lowell
A Sentimental Tribute: Marianne Moore
Some Notes on Robert Lowell
On “The Man-Moth”
Flannery O’Connor: 1925-1964
An Inadequate Tribute: Randall Jarrell
Introduction to The Burglar of Babylon
Preface to Woodlawn North by Milton Kessler
Introduction to An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry
A Brief Reminiscence and a Brief Tribute: Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden
Laureate’s Words of Acceptance
Foreword to Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography
Statement for the English Memorial Service for Robert Lowell
Four Blurbs
May Swenson’s A Cage of Spines
May Swenson’s To Mix with Time
Frank Bidart’s Golden State
Sandra McPherson’s Radiation

Letters

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