Wikipedia Tour: Famous Poets (2 of 41)
FAMOUS POETS (CONT’D)ELIZABETH BISHOP
Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979), was an American poet and writer from Worcester, Massachusetts. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956.
Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts to William Thomas Bishop and Gertrude Bulmer Bishop. Elizabeth’s father, who was an executive of Bishop Contractors, a family-owned New England construction firm, died of Bright's disease when she was eight months old. In the wake of that event, Bishop’s mother descended into mental illness and was institutionalized in 1916, when Elizabeth was five. Although Bishop’s mother would live until 1934 in an asylum, they would not meet again.
Effectively orphaned, Bishop lived with her Canadian Bulmer grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia, a period she remembered fondly and would later idealize in her writing. She passed an unhappy nine months with her father's family in Worcester (described in her memoir The Country Mouse), where she developed asthma and eczema, the first of many allergies Bishop suffered in her lifetime. Her health improved when she moved near Boston to live with her Aunt Maud, her mother’s sister.
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Wikipedia Tour: Famous Poets
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