Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box by Elizabeth Bishop

Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box by Elizabeth Bishop

From the mid-1930s to 1978 Elizabeth Bishop published some ninety poems and thirty translations. Yet her notebooks reveal that she embarked upon many more compositions, some existing in only fragmentary form and some embodied in extensive drafts. Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box presents, alongside facsimiles of many notebook pages from which they are drawn, poems Bishop began soon after college, reflecting her passion for Elizabethan verse and surrealist technique; love poems and dream fragments from the 1940s; poems about her Canadian childhood; and many other works that heretofore have been quoted almost exclusively in biographical and critical studies.

This revelatory and moving selection brings us into the poet's laboratory, showing us the initial provocative images that moved Bishop to begin a poem, illustrating terrain unexplored in the work published during her lifetime. Editor Alice Quinn has also mined the Bishop archives for rich tangential material that illuminates the poet's sources and intentions.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), a modern American poet, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for her collection Poems: North & South. She won the National Book Award for The Collected Poems (1969), the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976, and numerous other awards and honors for her work. She was born in the city of Worcester in the state of Massachusetts. As an adult, she traveled extensively, spending years in France and then Brazil before returning to the United States.