Project Description
Elizabeth Bishop (USA, 1911-1979) – American poet whose poetry often reflects her nomadic life (she spent time travelling throughout Europe and America and lived in Brazil for 15 years). In addition to her exceptional metaphors and perceptive descriptions, Bishop’s poetry also focuses on loss, estrangement, loneliness and isolation. Extremely self-critical, she published rarely, so that her poems printed during her lifetime numbered barely a hundred. Yet, her originality, as well as the technical brilliance of her poetry with its astonishing formal variety, has made Bishop one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. She taught at Harvard, and some of her poetry collections are: North and South (1946), Questions of Travel (1965), Geography III (1976) and Collected Poems: 1927-1979, published posthumously in 1983. All poems here are excerpted from Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), except „It is marvellous to wake up together…“, published in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-box (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006).