Elizabeth Bishop explored Brazil extensively, making trips down the Amazon, traversing the tropical rainforest with Aldous Huxley…
Read MoreElizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell by Thomas Travisano One of the most thought provoking notices I encountered of the much and flatteringly reviewed Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell was by Paul Mariani in America magazine, “The National Catholic Weekly.” Mariani acknowledged at the review’s outset that Though I…
Read Moreby Thomas Travisano The poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was once considered a comparatively isolated figure. Because she shunned labels and avoided becoming identified with well-publicized literary movements, she was once considered—as David Kalstone wrote in 1977— a “hard [writer] to ‘place.’” However, as her posthumous fame has grown and she has not only reached “major”…
Read MoreThomas Travisano paints a structured, sensitive portrait of Bishop. He is at his best when explaining her work, which he immaculately interweaves with her life.
Read MoreCape Breton Highlands National Park. Photograph by Sri Nagubandi by Claire Seiler Elizabeth Bishop’s most impactful letter of the summer of 1947 was the first substantive one she ever wrote to Robert Lowell. Written from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia on August 14, that first real letter of the poets’ storied epistolary friendship begins with a…
Read MoreSundown on the Amazon by Neil Besner I What is a map, and which maps are memory’s or imagination’s to invoke, and then how? What lies in the incantatory power of names, or in the pull North or South, West or East? What is time, what is memory, and what’s imagined about these plain facts…
Read MoreBrazilian Landscape, Eizabeth Bishop by Angus Cleghorn After a decade in Brazil, Elizabeth Bishop was offered a $10,000 advance “to provide the text for the Life World Library Brazil, but famously disliked how the editors changed what she wrote” (Bishop: Poems, Prose & Letters viii) in the 1962 volume. In a letter written to her…
Read MoreBishop’s persona is part she-moose, part bus; part warrior-fish, part oily vessel; part pastoral idyll, and part atomic bomb…
Read MoreFrom The New York Review of Books: From his father, who loved the natural world, Hemingway learned in childhood to fish and shoot, and a love of these things shaped his life along with a third thing, writing. Almost from the first there is his distinct voice. In his journal of a camping trip he…
Read MoreFrom The Morning News: Robert Penn Warren, Carl Sandburg, and Sherwood Anderson himself all testified to Seager’s talent and skill. Poet and novelist James Dickey said he owed his career to reading Amos Berry, Seager’s third, and by many accounts, best novel, once remarking, “I doubt if I’d’ve tried to be a poet if it…
Read MoreJames Stewart as Jefferson Smith in Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Columbia Pictures, 1939 From Humanities: To understand the fortunes of American communism during its heyday in the 1930s and forties requires a healthy taste for irony. On the one hand, the apostles of Lenin and Stalin yoked themselves to one of the bloodiest, most…
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