Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishopwas an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth8 February 1911
CityWorcester, MA
CountryUnited States of America
sailing care soap
Ports are necessities, like postage stamps or soap, but they seldom seem to care what impressions they make.
feet pigs littles
The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.
dream real men
Bishop on "At the Fishhouses"At the last minute, after I'd had a chance to do a little research in Cape Breton, I foundI'd said codfish scales once when it should have been herring scales. I hope theycorrected it all right.2Quite a few lines of "At the Fishhouses" came to me in a dream, and the scene- whichwas real enough, I'd recently been there-but the old man and the conversation, etc.,were all in a later dream
dream car dangerous
The armored cars of dreams, contrived to let us do so many a dangerous thing.
moving knowledge dark
It is what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
beach spring ocean
It was cold and windy, scarcely the day to take a walk on that long beach Everything was withdrawn as far as possible, indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, seabirds in ones or twos. The rackety, icy, offshore wind numbed our faces on one side; disrupted the formation of a lone flight of Canada geese; and blew back the low, inaudible rollers in upright, steely mist.
insomnia sleepers daytime
Insomnia" perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.
men moths
...what the Man-Moth fears most he must do..
art your-loss losing
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
men shadow hats
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
color maps west
Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West. More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.
passing-by forget passings
Hoping to live days of greater happiness, I forget that days of less happiness are passing by.
art delicate-things roaring
Why shouldn't we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music [...], some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?
writing thinking littles
And as to experience-well, think how little some good poets have had, or how much some bad ones have.