Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop by Thomas Travisano (Engli

Description: Love Unknown by Thomas Travisano An illuminating new biography of Elizabeth Bishop, one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth centuryElizabeth Bishops friend James Merrill once observed that "Elizabeth had more talent for life--and for poetry--than anyone else Ive known." This new biography reveals just how she learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters--a remarkable body of work that would make her one of Americas most beloved and respected poets. In Love Unknown, Thomas Travisano, founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, tells the story of the famous poet and travelers life.As a child, Bishop lost her father to Brights disease, then her mother to a mental breakdown--losses that would undeniably shape her view of the world. A keen observer of human nature even then, she honed her talent through adolescence as she moved between Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, then firmly established herself as a poet during her time at Vassar College. Bishop moved through extraordinary mid-twentieth-century worlds with relationships among an international network of literati, visual artists, musicians, scholars, and politicians--along with a cosmopolitan gay underground that was then nearly invisible to the dominant culture. Drawing on fresh interviews and newly discovered manuscript materials, Travisano illuminates that the "art of losing" that Bishop celebrated with such poignant irony in her poem, "One Art," perhaps her most famous, was linked in equal part to an "art of finding," that Bishops art and life was devoted to the sort of encounters and epiphanies that so often appear in her work. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Thomas Travisano is the founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society and the principal editor of the acclaimed Words in Air- The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. He is a lifelong student of Elizabeth Bishop. Travisano is professor of English at Hartwick College, where he has taught since 1982. He has twice served as Hartwicks Wandersee Scholar in Residence, has twice held the Cora A. Babcock Chair in English, and is a winner of Hartwicks Teacher-Scholar Award. Review "The accounts [in Love Unknown] are parsed with particular insight by Travisano, a Bishop specialist, who assiduously traces the influence of the life on the work." —The New Yorker"Reading [Love Unknown] is almost as enjoyable as reading one of Bishops strange and marvelous poems." —The Washington Post"A definitive biography–cum–literary study of Elizabeth Bishop… Travisanos essential volume illuminates Bishops life and, most valuably, her work." —Publishers Weekly (starred)"Utterly captivating... illuminating, interwoven analysis of [Elizabeth Bishops] work." —Booklist (starred) "A masterly biography." —Library Journal (starred) "An authoritative and sensitive biography... A finely textured portrait of an acclaimed poet." —Kirkus"This is the biography weve been waiting for. Alternately heartbreaking and joyous, it contains many fascinating discoveries, all orchestrated by an insightful, sympathetic narrator." —Steven Axelrod, President of the Robert Lowell Society and author of Robert Lowell: Life and Art"Thomas Travisanos new critical biography, Love Unknown, is as illuminating as it is engrossing—a major addition to our ever-deepening understanding of Bishops life and singular art." —Lloyd Schwartz, poet, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, and co-editor of Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters"You are confident, reading Travisanos Love Unknown, that his biography comes as close to communicating an understanding and appreciation of the elusive and complicated Bishop as can be achieved." —Scott Donaldson, author of Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald and The Paris Husband"Elizabeth Bishops great poetry has been considered an art of loss, as in her celebrated ironic line, the art of losing isnt hard to master. In Thomas Travisanos new, wide-ranging biography, she emerges instead as a poet of gain upon gain, maker of an art grown from all she had lost in childhood. He gives us a writer alive to adventure, ever seeking, discovering, and burning with the fire to transmute ordinary things she encounters into gold." —Grace Schulman, winner of the Frost Medal of Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry"Thomas Travisano has deftly orchestrated an immense amount of research and years of meditation on the life of this great poet. The result is a biography that is full of revelations, indispensable readings of the poems, no candle unlit in illuminating Bishops writing life from childhood to her last year. This is an utterly captivating book." —Howard Norman, author of The Ghost Clause"Thomas Travisano displays a particular mastery of the contexts of Elizabeth Bishops life and art. He offers much new and precisely evaluated insight into Bishops family, friends and communities. Travisano ends his biography in a truly Bishop-like fashion—with a funny and incisive story, a story that shows how well he appreciates and can emulate Bishops singular and deceptive casualness of tone." —Lorrie Goldensohn, author of Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry Review Quote "The accounts [in Love Unknown ] are parsed with particular insight by Travisano, a Bishop specialist, who assiduously traces the influence of the life on the work." -- The New Yorker "Reading [ Love Unknown ] is almost as enjoyable as reading one of Bishops strange and marvelous poems." -- The Washington Post "A definitive biography-cum-literary study of Elizabeth Bishop... Travisanos essential volume illuminates Bishops life and, most valuably, her work." -- Publishers Weekly (starred) "Utterly captivating... illuminating, interwoven analysis of [Elizabeth Bishops] work." -- Booklist (starred) "A masterly biography." -- Library Journal (starred) "An authoritative and sensitive biography... A finely textured portrait of an acclaimed poet." -- Kirkus "This is the biography weve been waiting for. Alternately heartbreaking and joyous, it contains many fascinating discoveries, all orchestrated by an insightful, sympathetic narrator." -- Steven Axelrod, President of the Robert Lowell Society and author of Robert Lowell: Life and Art "Thomas Travisanos new critical biography, Love Unknown , is as illuminating as it is engrossing--a major addition to our ever-deepening understanding of Bishops life and singular art." -- Lloyd Schwartz , poet, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, and co-editor of Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters "You are confident, reading Travisanos Love Unknown , that his biography comes as close to communicating an understanding and appreciation of the elusive and complicated Bishop as can be achieved." --Scott Donaldson , author of Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald and The Paris Husband "Elizabeth Bishops great poetry has been considered an art of loss, as in her celebrated ironic line, the art of losing isnt hard to master. In Thomas Travisanos new, wide-ranging biography, she emerges instead as a poet of gain upon gain, maker of an art grown from all she had lost in childhood. He gives us a writer alive to adventure, ever seeking, discovering, and burning with the fire to transmute ordinary things she encounters into gold." -- Grace Schulman , winner of the Frost Medal of Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry "Thomas Travisano has deftly orchestrated an immense amount of research and years of meditation on the life of this great poet. The result is a biography that is full of revelations, indispensable readings of the poems, no candle unlit in illuminating Bishops writing life from childhood to her last year. This is an utterly captivating book." -- Howard Norman , author of The Ghost Clause "Thomas Travisano displays a particular mastery of the contexts of Elizabeth Bishops life and art. He offers much new and precisely evaluated insight into Bishops family, friends and communities. Travisano ends his biography in a truly Bishop-like fashion--with a funny and incisive story, a story that shows how well he appreciates and can emulate Bishops singular and deceptive casualness of tone." --Lorrie Goldensohn , author of Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry Promotional "Headline" An illuminating new biography of Elizabeth Bishop, one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century Excerpt from Book Chapter One Between Two Worlds When Elizabeth Bishop was three years old, she witnessed the Great Salem Fire-an event that took place on the night of June 25, 1914, and that she would remember for the rest of her life. The fire raged in the darkness, sweeping through nearly 250 acres of the historic Massachusetts harbor town of Salem and reducing to charred ruins the homes of more than twenty thousand inhabitants. The flames forced hundreds of Salems residents to flee in small boats across Palmer Cove toward the relative safety of Marblehead on the opposite shore. It was there, near the beach at Marblehead, that Elizabeth was sharing a summer house with her recently widowed mother, Gertrude Bulmer Bishop, and her fathers family. In the posthumously published poem "A Drunkard," Bishop recalled that as the flames across the bay grew higher, "the sky was bright red; everything was red: / out on the lawn, my mothers white dress looked / rose-red; my white enameled crib was red," and she watched as boats filled with escaping people arrived on their beach. Yet the residents of Marblehead themselves felt anything but safe, for "the red sky was filled with flying motes / cinders and coals," and many citizens were hosing their roofs to prevent their houses, too, from bursting into flame. In the midst of this chaotic scene, the child, in search of her mother outdoors, found Gertrude and various neighbors giving coffee and food to Salems refugees. Her own cries for attention and reassurance went unnoticed. All Bishop could later recall receiving from her mother was a stern reprimand early the next morning, when the two were pacing the shoreline. As the child out of curiosity picked up a fragment of a womans long black cotton stocking from a beach "strewn with cinders, dark with ash- / strange objects . . . blown across the water," her mother responded sharply, "Put that down!" This rebuke for her inquisitiveness provoked deep embarrassment and guilt, feelings that would echo through the decades in her memory, only to reappear in a profoundly self-exploratory poem-linking this experience with her problem with periodic alcohol abuse-that Bishop still had on her desk at the moment of her death. Bishops mother, Gertrude, was in fragile psychological health when the Great Fire occurred in 1914. Her bouts of emotional disturbance had become acute following the death of her husband three years earlier, when the infant Elizabeth was eight months old. Two years after the fire, when the child was five, Gertrude would suffer a mental breakdown from which she never recovered. Bishop would continue to be haunted by her mothers disturbing outcries: "a scream, the echo of a scream" that, as she discloses in her 1953 story "In the Village," signaled her mothers mental collapse. This was the scream that became a part of Bishops inner world and "came there to live forever-not loud, just alive forever." Bishop would continue to suffer from these and other traumatic early losses-losses so extreme and so well remembered that she once told her friend and fellow poet Robert Lowell, "When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived." Yet there was another side to Bishops personality that must be understood if we are to grasp the complex persona she presented to the world both in her personal life and in her poetry. Though her frequently traumatic past was very much alive for her, Bishop was also extraordinarily engaged with the present. When, approaching sixty, Bishop arrived to teach at Harvard University in the fall of 1970, the younger poet Kathleen Spivack noted that "she had the quality of surprised youthfulness in her eyes." Spivack also found her "quite unlike the austere public persona of Miss Bishop" that Spivack had come to expect from the elder poets reputation. In her second year at Harvard, Bishop set up a Ping-Pong table in the foyer of her small apartment on Brattle Street; playing the game was supposed to help the arthritis in her hands. Spivack recalls their weekly Ping-Pong matches where "Elizabeth dashed about on her side of the table, her charming face pursed with concentration, and bursting into laughter at her tricky shots." Later in the evening, when guests arrived for dinner, they would be seated around the Ping-Pong table, now sans net and demurely graced by a tablecloth. As her friend and Harvard colleague Monroe Engel observed, Bishop didnt have space in her apartment for both her Ping-Pong table and a dining table, so she chose the former because, as she declared, "You could eat off the Ping-Pong table, but you couldnt play Ping-Pong on a dining table." According to her student Jonathan Galassi, Bishop had, in her college classroom, "almost willfully old-fashioned manners." She addressed her students by their last names, a practice that had almost died out in American higher education by the early 1970s. However, she could also be unapologetically herself at moments where a little more decorum might have been expected. Bishops blend of mannerly correctness and casual and cheeky unconventionality also plays out in her poetry, as does her seemingly contradictory fusing of spot-on accuracy with her uniquely homespun version of surrealism. She termed the latter quality "the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life." These paradoxical characteristics, plus her unquenchably youthful curiosity and her capacity for wit and droll amusement-which the late Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney termed her "dry, merry quality"-helped attract a wide and distinguished body of friends, many of whom also became her devoted correspondents. These fortunate individuals became the recipients of a steady stream of Bishops sharp and revealing letters, letters that are now widely regarded as one of the most brilliant and significant bodies of correspondence of the last century. When Bishop began to teach writing and literature at Harvard University in 1970-and settled, the following fall, into that compact Brattle Street apartment just north of Harvard Square-she was very much a seasoned traveler. She had sojourned for most of the previous two decades in Brazil, and before and after that had lived for extended periods in Canada, France, Key West, Mexico, Washington, DC, Seattle, and San Francisco, punctuated by stopovers in locales as varied as coastal Maine, Cape Cod, Newfoundland, Spain, North Africa, Tuscany, and (most frequently) New Yorks Greenwich Village, where she kept for several years a "garret" on King Street as a pied-^-terre. But now, in her final decade, Bishop had returned to native ground. Her apartment on Brattle Street was just forty miles east of the residence (no longer standing) at 875 Main Street in Worcester, Massachusetts, where Bishop first drew breath. The sturdy granite gravestone in Worcesters Hope Cemetery under which Bishops ashes lie buried-alongside the remains of her Canadian-born mother and her Worcester-born father-may be found just minutes north of the place of Bishops birth. Yet Bishops "there and back again" had been a long, eventful journey. The Worcester of 1911, the year Bishop was born, was a bustling, prosperous, steadily growing industrial city-the third-largest urban center in New England after Boston and Providence, Rhode Island. Worcester was a community in which the Bishop family played a prominent role, but Bishop herself would not remember it fondly. Bishop claimed in a letter to Anne Stevenson, the author of the earliest critical book about her, that she had spent only a few miserable months in Worcester with her paternal grandparents. Between the ages of eight and sixteen, she had lived most of the year with a maternal aunt in a working-class neighborhood near Boston. These long and weary months, when she was mostly housebound due to illness, were relieved by summers with her maternal grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Bishops sense of her own national, regional, and familial identity was always complex and fluid. She was born in the United States to an American father and was thus legally an American citizen. However, Bishop described herself to Stevenson as three-fourths Canadian and one-fourth New Englander, because her paternal grandfather, like her mothers family, had been born in Canada. Yet even her Canadian roots were mixed with American; as she told Stevenson, "My maternal grandparents were, some of them, Tories, who left upper N.Y. State and were given land grants in Nova Scotia by George III." Bishops fathers family, the Bishops of Worcester, and her mothers family, the Bulmers of her beloved Great Village, Nova Scotia, were both respected within their communities, but the Bishops of Worcester were successful entrepreneurs and far more prosperous. In fact, the fulsomely titled Historic Homes and Institutions and Genealogical and Personal Memoirs of Worcester County, Massachusetts, published in 1907, extolled Elizabeths paternal grandfather, John W. Bishop, as a living exemplar of the American Dream, and Bishop herself would later note, "His was an Horatio Alger story." In the view of Historic Homes, Bishops paternal grandfather was a man whose "rise from humble beginnings to a foremost place in the business world" contained "a valuable lesson" on the way to wealth and professional stature. Historic Homes records that John W. was born on Canadas Prince Edward Island in 1846, hence Bishops claim that she was three-fourths Canadian. John W. migrated with his family to Rhode Island when he was eleven. After only a year of formal schooling, he was put to work in a cotton mill, where he labored hard unt Details ISBN0143111280 Author Thomas Travisano Short Title Love Unknown Language English ISBN-10 0143111280 ISBN-13 9780143111283 Format Paperback Subtitle The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop Year 2020 Country of Publication United States US Release Date 2020-11-03 UK Release Date 2020-11-03 Place of Publication New York Narrator Jon Culshaw Illustrator Jody Wheeler Translator Sophie Bowman Birth 1939 Death 1925 Affiliation Department of Psychology, University of New Mexico, USA Position Department of Psychology Qualifications Ph.D. Pages 432 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Publication Date 2020-11-03 DEWEY B Audience General NZ Release Date 2021-02-01 AU Release Date 2021-02-01 Imprint Plume We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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