Mar 28, 2008  |  By: KATHI WOLFE  | COMMENTS     

The sexual orientation of great American poet Elizabeth Bishop was an open secret.  Mary McCarthy used Bishop as the model for the lesbian character in her novel “The Group.” Her lovers helped her with her life-long struggles with alcoholism and asthma. Yet, Bishop, who died in 1978 at 68, had little use for “confessional poetry.”  “You just wish [confessional poets would] keep some of these things to themselves,” Bishop told Time magazine in 1967.

Though Bishop said that she believed in “closet, closets, closets,” wry, poignant, yet unsentimental glimpses of her personal life and emotions can be found in a new volume of her writings from the Library of America. This comprehensive (and at 900-plus pages, mammoth) collection “Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters,” is edited by Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz. Giroux was Bishop’s longtime editor and Schwartz is an English professor at Boston University.   

“—Cold as it is, we’d/go to bed, dear,/early, but never/ to keep warm,” Bishop wrote in the mid-’60s in an unpublished poem called “Dear, My Compass.”  This work is part of the extensive selection of unpublished and draft poems included in the Library of America volume.

Bishop’s poetry is admired for its imagery and formal brilliance. Known for her perfectionism, renowned gay poet John Ashbery called Bishop a “writer’s writer’s writer.”  Fewer than 100 of her poems were published while she lived.

Two years ago, Bishop’s “closets” were opened with the publication of “Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments” by Elizabeth Bishop and edited by Alice Quinn.

The Giroux and Schwartz collection, which includes not only poetry, but translations, travel pieces, essays, letters and short stories, provides an even more vibrant portrait of Bishop’s life.

BISHOP WAS BORN IN Worcester, Mass., and after her father died and her mother was committed to a mental institution, she was raised by her grandparents and then her aunt in Nova Scotia. Bishop graduated from Vassar College in 1934. (In seeming contradiction to her protestations against personal revelations, Bishop left more than 3,500 pages of her papers to Vassar.)

Bishop lived and traveled in many places, including Key West, Fla., New York, Brazil, San Francisco and Boston. She had several long-term relationships with women — the most significant of which was her 12-year partnership with Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares.

“Poems, Prose and Letters” includes renowned Bishop works such as her villanelle “One Art.” Who could forget the poem’s final stanza? “–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture/I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident/the art of losing’s not too hard to master/though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”

But, this superb collection offers literary essays, reminiscences and reportage that will surprise, and even amuse, both devotees and new readers of Bishop’s work.
In an essay entitled “A Brief Reminiscence and a Brief Tribute,” Bishop, known for her public reticence regarding sexuality, praised W. H. Auden’s “sexual courage” in writing openly about homosexuality.

Her letters to literary friends such as Robert Lowell, T.C. Wilson and James Merrill abound not only with references to high art but with accounts of buying pastry and listening to Fats Waller and Chubby Checker. “I bought a can of a new kind of coffee ... & can scarcely wait to try it,” she wrote in a note to Merrill.

Though Bishop received many honors in her career from the Pulitzer Prize to the National Book Award, she disliked literary effeteness. “The analysis of poetry is growing more and more pretentious …,” Bishop wrote in an essay entitled “It All Depends,” “After a session with a few … highbrow magazines one doesn’t want to look at a poem for weeks, much less start writing one.”

Refreshingly free of pomposity, “Poems, Prose and Letters” will make you want to look at Bishop’s intelligent, witty and beautiful work.  From her hilarious piece on her experience with the U.S.A. School of Writing to her translation of Octovio Paz, this breathtaking collection is worth a read.