Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishopwas an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth8 February 1911
CityWorcester, MA
CountryUnited States of America
art your-loss losing
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
men shadow hats
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
color maps west
Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West. More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.
art delicate-things roaring
Why shouldn't we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music [...], some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?
writing thinking littles
And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.
art self useless
What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.
world angle made
I was made at right angles to the world and I see it so. I can only see it so.
strong swimming heaven
Heaven is not like flying or swimming, but has something to do with blackness and a strong glare.
breakup art writing
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.
fighting filled-up oil
I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels-until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.
dream our-dreams
Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too?
moving dark salt
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.
stories pages way
I HATED the Salinger story. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?
falling-in-love stupid intelligent
Sometimes it seemsas though only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love & only stupid people are intelligent enough to let themselves be loved.