Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was an American poet who grew in prominence during the so-called “Confessional” period in poetry of the 1950s-1960s, which saw such poets as Robert Lowell (1917-1977) and Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) using their personal lives as the subject of their poems; but Bishop, who was close friends with Lowell, wrote poems marked by a fine eye for detailing the physical world and relied more on objective exposition – distancing herself from her material even when it was personal through the use of the third person narrator – than on subjective introspection. Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1956 and the National Book Award for poetry in 1970. Despite being a woman and a lesbian, Bishop eschewed the feminist indulgence in the identity politics of the time, refusing to allow her work to be published in all-female anthologies and, according to some feminist critics, may have even been hostile to the feminist movement in general. However, Bishop argued that she wished to be judged on the basis of her talent, not the fact that she was a woman.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was an American poet who grew in prominence during the so-called “Confessional” period in poetry of the 1950s-1960s, which saw such poets as Robert Lowell (1917-1977) and Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) using their personal lives as the subject of their poems; but Bishop, who was close friends with Lowell, wrote poems marked by a fine eye for detailing the physical world and relied more on objective exposition – distancing herself from her material even when it was personal through the use of the third person narrator – than on subjective introspection. Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1956 and the National Book Award for poetry in 1970. Despite being a woman and a lesbian, Bishop eschewed the feminist indulgence in the identity politics of the time, refusing to allow her work to be published in all-female anthologies and, according to some feminist critics, may have even been hostile to the feminist movement in general. However, Bishop argued that she wished to be judged on the basis of her talent, not the fact that she was a woman.
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