Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop

Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop

Whether writing about waiting as a child in a dentist's office, viewing a city from a plane high above, or losing items ranging from door keys to one's lover in the masterfully restrained "One Art," Elizabeth Bishop somehow conveyed both large and small emotional truths in language of stunning exactitude and even more astonishing resonance. As John Ashbery has written, "The private self . . . melts imperceptibly into the large utterance, the grandeur of poetry, which, because it remains rooted in everyday particulars, never sounds 'grand,' but is as quietly convincing as everyday speech."

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.