hi everyone and welcome to the first video in my new series this time we're going to be looking at the american poet elizabeth bishop now the videos in this playlist we'll look at her poems that are on the syllabus for the leaving cert in particular but will hopefully be useful for many more of you who may have a more general interest in bishop and in her poetry so on the surface bishop seems a fairly easy poet to study her poems are often written in a very straightforward way using conversational or ordinary everyday language sometimes we might even wonder why someone would write a poem at all about a fish or an armadillo or even a petrol station upon closer inspection however we see that bishop's poems are carefully and finely crafted paying close attention to language sound and imagery and it's through her detailed description she reveals to us profound insights about the world around us so elizabeth bishop was born in worcester massachusetts usa in 1911. her early life was marked by tragedy her father died when she was only eight months old and this event led to her mother's mental breakdown her mother ended up being institutionalized permanently in a hospital for the mentally ill when bishop was five years old and she never saw her mother again a sense of loss and separation can be traced through many of her poems and it's not hard to see a connection between her childhood experiences and some of the descriptions that we see in her poetry bishop spent most of her childhood with her mother's parents in great village nova scotia in canada she had fond memories of this period of her life and always referred to it as home due to the uncertainty of her younger years she clung to her maternal grandparents for security but later fearing for elizabeth's education her father's family living in worcester and south boston gained custody of her and she went to live with her father's parents despite their wealth this was a very unhappy period of her life and she developed chronic asthma as well as eczema and some other conditions that were thought to be linked to her anxiety and unhappiness recognizing or her unhappiness bishop was sent away again by her father's family and this time to live with her mother's eldest sister maude in another part of boston her father's family however continued to pay for her education and her new carer mod introduced her to the port of the victorian period despite the displacement she experienced she benefited greatly from her father's family's financial support and her aunt mods poetry collection having not been a regular attender at school in her younger years because of illnesses bishop went back to school for her freshman year at walnut hills school a private boarding school between boston and worcester she was happy here and she began making friends she was very well liked and even became somewhat popular having had few of any friends in childhood this was very strange to her but soothed some of the loneliness that she felt this was even the place where her first poems were published in the school's literary magazine called the blue pencil following this she attended vassar college a prestigious university in new york again thanks to her grandparents money and she studied english literature she continued to write poetry at college and founded a rebel literature magazine called conspirato in direct opposition to the college's established literary journal that refused to publish her and her friend's work because their work was too modern bishop graduated from vassar in 1934 with a ba and it was also in this year that she was introduced to the poet marianne moore someone who would prove to be a huge influence on bishop and her poetry moore's poetry was well known and appreciated for its clarity and detail something the modernist and even post-modern poets prized greatly after graduating from vassal bishop's life on the road began bishop inherited quite a lot of money from her father which allowed her to travel widely although always on a tight budget without having to worry about working she spent time in key west in florida paris france and 15 years in brazil with her partner laura de macedo suarez bishop's sexuality wasn't necessarily a secret but it wasn't something that bishop spoke about the irish writer colin tobin in his book about bishop says that bishop's homosexuality was well known in literary circles and among her friends and acquaintances but if elizabeth knew that people talked about it she would have been horrified bishop was a very private person and she was very careful with the details of her private life the author thomas travisano in his book love unknown the life and worlds of elizabeth bishop tells a really interesting story about when bishop was a child that shows us exactly how private she was after bishop's mother was institutionalized bishop's grandmother used to send her regular packages with things like chocolate and sweets to the hospital after her grandmother had prepared the package and written the address on it the young elizabeth was sent to the post office with it she would make sure however to hold the package with the address side close to her body so nobody could read it she wouldn't stop either to talk to any of the people in the village until after she had dropped the package to the post office not wanting anybody to know about her mother and where she was although it's likely that in a small village like that everybody knew anyway despite her private nature some of bishop's personal experiences especially from childhood can be seen in their poems there's an important distinction to be drawn here though around the same time that bishop was writing there was a relatively new brand of poetry or type of poetry being published called confessional poetry her close friend robert lowell was one of the most famous writers of this type of poetry confessional poetry was characterized by the use of personal material from the poet's life in the poetry that was produced of course it's very difficult to write any poetry without using personal experience or the ideas that you have in your own head and how they have shaped how you see the world but confessional poetry was something different something altogether more personal lowell for example wrote about his struggles with mental illness john berryman another confessional poet wrote in about an affair that he had had with another woman while he was still married sylvia plath one of the most famous confessional poets who was taught by lol at university used events from her own life repeatedly in her poetry now to bishop the idea of exposing yourself in this way was horrifying she even referred to confessional poetry as nonsense and at one point she wrote to lol and tried to stop him from publishing something that he had sent to her to read in that piece he had used extracts from letters that were sent to him by a woman and bishop said that even if he had gotten permission which he hadn't aren't you violating a trust art just isn't worth that much so how do we square this version of bishop the one who was so uncomfortable with revealing anything personal anything of herself to her readers with the bishop who uses her memories of childhood in poems such as first death in nova scotia which is about the death of her cousin the waiting room or cestina well one thing we notice is that bishop has two styles that she sometimes blends together the first and the one that was greatly encouraged by her friend the poet marianne moore was her precise detailed description this is seen in poems such as the fish and filling station among others bishop creates distance between herself and the subject she is describing the aim here is to reveal something about the object described that's deeper than the surface detail the second style in which she was encouraged by lowell can be seen when she writes poetry that deals with personal experience obvious personal experience like the three poems i've just mentioned before in these poems we notice that she writes in a more stylized way she adopts a third person narrator or she uses a formalized structured approach such as sonnets villanelles and cestinas poems that have rules in them saying how that they must be written a sonnet for example has to have 14 lines and a volta a change in line nine a villanelle is a nineteen line poem with five ter sets followed by a quatrain while a cestina is six six line stanzas with the n words repeated throughout so we can look at this as a way of masking or hiding herself behind these forms she comes close to revealing personal things but she cannot quite be free with her words and lines yes she used personal experiences to inform her poetry this was the other side of her encouraged by robert lowell as opposed to the clinical descriptive side of her celebrated by marianne moore but she never gave too much away she was always more interested in concealment we could draw parallels between this idea and her sexuality but that may perhaps be pushing it too far certainly more than the poet herself would have been comfortable with according to jeff gordanier writing in the new york times what bishop had to say about her struggles and about her romantic partnerships stayed mostly buried in between the impeccably calibrated lines of her poems everything that could be gleaned was felt within the quiver of her silences these silences caused some readers of bishop's poetry discomfort they're put off by her cold and distant description but it is in this level of description that we see some of the most fascinating revelations in her poetry the last line someone loves us all in filling station wouldn't have the same power and resonance without the minute description of the hirsute begonia or the greece impregnated wickerwork another interesting idea is one that comes again from columbine he says that in bishop's work much was implied by what seemed to be mere description so description was a way of avoiding self-description looking at the world was a way of looking away from herself the self in bishop's poems was too fragile to be violated by too much mentioning so in this case maybe we too as students should not violate bishop self and focus solely on her poetry the craft and technique and that is in evidence bishop clearly cared deeply and put great effort into her work it's important not to get too distracted by the poet behind the work itself bishop famously never allowed her work to be included in all female poetry anthologies she never saw herself as a female or a lesbian poet simply as a poet an example of how much attention bishop paid to her poetry is the fact that she only published four books of poetry in her lifetime plus one collected works roughly once every 10 years from 1946 she was famously careful about what would be included and she left out a huge amount of the poetry that she had written during the years robert lowell said of her that she would leave unfinished drafts of poems lying around with individual words missing from lines waiting for the right word to come to her a famous poem of hers called the moose took her years to finish but all of these poems once they were finished appeared effortless the fact that bishop was so selective about which of her poems would be published and in what order they would be published led to some controversy in 2006 a new book a collection of bishops drafts and notes for poems that were never published came out helen wendler an american literary critic said that the publication of this book was a betrayal of bishop and that to publish her drafts and her notes went against bishop's commitment to exactness and it is this commitment to exactness that we find in many of her poems on the syllabus for the leaving cert it's often through her conversational tone the way that she draws you in with a seemingly ordinary line that she reveals something deep and profound evan boland the late irish poet said of bishop that she is a poet of the unsaid what has been left out this coupled with the quiver of her silences means that reading bishop is never easy or straightforward but it is always rewarding now some of the themes and ideas and techniques that are explored in bishop's poetry include her love of travel and landscape and particularly how the natural world can reveal deep insights to us if language is used carefully her childhood and the sense of dislocation and displacement and loss that she experienced can be seen in many of her poems as can some references to alcoholism and relationships personal identity the search for it and becoming an adult are also ideas that are explored in terms of technique bishop makes great use of sound in her poetry we see alliteration as well as sibilance assonance repetition and rhyme used to great effect in much of her poetry and these are all things that we will see when we examine each poem one by one she generally wrote in free verse which is poetry with no set or regular structure which gives the moments of rhyme that she does use heightened focus she often used trimeter three pairs of syllables in her poetry which sometimes gives a sense of regularity and rhythm to the otherwise free verse now i hope that you found this introduction to elizabeth bishop useful please subscribe to get updates and never miss a new video on bishop and any of the other content that we cover please feel free to like and to leave a comment and thank you for watching