Critical Biography of Elizabeth Bishop

FAIN: FT-57948-10

Thomas J. Travisano
Hartwick College (Oneonta, NY 13820-4000)

My project is a new critical biography of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), one of the most important American poets of the 20th Century. Although she published comparatively little in her lifetime, our image of her as a writer and as a person has undergone continuous revision due to the posthumous publication of powerful and revealing new writings. The next stage for Bishop Studies is to synthesize the various threads of investigation that have emerged over two decades, through a critical and cultural biography. Based on my lifelong engagement with Bishop's art, life, and world, I am well qualified to write such a biography. This book will reveal Bishop as a poet of the border-grounds, a cosmopolitan poet who explored with verve and insight issues of gender, sexuality, nationality, social class, and personal and cultural identity. It will show how her engagement with these issues has helped her to seem ever more contemporary, and therefore become ever more popular and influential.