One Art: Letters of Elizabeth Bishop - Hardcover

Bishop, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374226407 ISBN 13: 9780374226404

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994

Synopsis

Robert Lowell once remarked, "When Elizabeth Bishop's letters are published (as they will be), she will be recognized as not only one of the best, but one of the most prolific writers of our century." One Art is the magificent confirmation of Lowell's prediction.

From several thousand letters, written by Bishop over fifty years—from 1928, when she was seventeen, to the day of her death, in Boston in 1979—Robert Giroux, the poet's longtime friend and editor, has selected over five hundred missives for this volume. In a way, the letters comprise Bishop's autobiography, and Giroux has greatly enhanced them with his own detailed, candid, and highly informative introduction. One Art takes us behind Bishop's formal sophistication and reserve, fully displaying the gift for friendship, the striving for perfection, and the passionate, questing, rigorous spirit that made her a great artist.

About this title

Review:

One Art is the best biography we have of the elusive Elizabeth Bishop. Robert Giroux, her editor and friend, has chosen well--and discreetly--from among the poet's several thousand letters. The collection begins with correspondence she wrote while still at Vassar in the '30s and ends with a letter written on the day she died, October 6, 1979. ("Well, I could go on--but I won't!" Bishop writes.) Still, we now have more than 600 pages of witty, well-mannered missives that often shade into deep emotion. Seemingly casual observation is a staple of Bishop's art and a delight in the letters: writing to Marianne Moore in 1938, she asserts that an unappealing stray she is nonetheless feeding looks just like Picasso's Absinthe Drinker. Nor is she any less irreverent when it comes to the lifestyles of the poetic and famous. In 1950, she tells Robert Lowell that she's reading Yeats's A Vision--"or trying to. Have you? Sometimes it's Jungian. The picture of Yeats going 'Woof! Woof!' in a lower berth, in the dark, in California, in order to wake up his wife, who was dreaming she was a cat, is very pleasing, I think."

Bishop often hid her sadness behind charm, but she could also be astonishingly frank. In addition to the personal revelations, there are discussions of poems' origins. "Quite a few lines of 'At the Fishhouses' came to me in a dream," she tells U. T. and Joseph Summers. "And the scene--which was real enough, I'd recently been there--but the old man and the conversation, etc., were all in a later dream." One caveat: Robert Giroux has kept commentary and notes to a minimum, so it's worth reading his introduction for deep background before you begin.

From the Back Cover:

This collection is a magnificent confirmation of Lowell's prediction. From several thousand letters, written over fifty years - from 1928 when she was seventeen (and already a poet) to the day of her death, in Boston in 1979 - Robert Giroux, her editor during her lifetime, has selected over 500 and has written a detailed and informative introduction. In one sense, Elizabeth Bishop's letters constitute her autobiography, including the story of her love for Lota Soares in Brazil, which ended with Lota's tragic suicide fifteen years later. They also record her intense relationships with her early mentor Marianne Moore and later with Robert Lowell. For Bishop, letter-writing was a joy and a necessity, an embodiment of the links between people, but also a facet of her art, conjuring the world in words. Some letters are carefully composed, elegant in style; some are spontaneous and witty, alive with unexpected detail; some contain poems sent as gifts; others are cries from the heart. Sometimes she ponders on her childhood, on her struggle to create, or to resist drink, but more often she responds fully and vividly to the immediate moment, the color of the sky, the books she has been reading, the friend she misses, the meal she is cooking, the toucan or cat she is observing, the room she is painting in a "Harlequinade" pattern of big colored diamonds. One Art takes us behind Bishop's formal sophistication and reserve, displaying to the full the gift for friendship, the striving for perfection, and the passionate, questing, rigorous spirit that made her a great poet.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0374226407
• ISBN 13: 9780374226404
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 668
• Editor: Giroux Robert