Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell were close friends, never lovers. Then one day, quite unexpectedly, he proposed marriage to her. Wisely, she refused him and their friendship survived. Lowell admired her work enormously and wrote perceptively and sensitively about her poems. In his admiration for her work, there is a current of all-toohuman anxiety: he is the most famous poet of their generation; indeed he is the dominant poet in the English-speaking world, but perhaps she is better than him? It is invidious to set up hierarchies of talent, but reputations do change over time, as readers and critics, perhaps, grow wiser.

In the 1960s and the early 70s, I read Lowell — we all did — and it was only the disappointment of his last three volumes that made me turn away from him. I turned to Elizabeth Bishop at the same time as I discovered three other poets — Emily Dickinson, John Clare and Christina Rossetti — with whom Bishop shares a central theme that I would call dwelling-in-the-world or ontological anxiety. Her images for this subject are oil-stained gas station forecourts and workshop floors, or the smell of gasoline left behind when the moose and a coach full of passengers meet in one of her most famous poems, The Moose.

That poem is partly a gentle and ironic tribute to Robert Frost (it begins north of Boston), and like all her poems it has a distinctive “sentence sound” — the term is Frost’s description of the vernacular speaking voice in poetry, a voice that is intimate, direct, touching, and which refuses heroic rhetoric.

Bishop has now the reputation of being one of the finest, most formally perfect poets of the second half of the 20th century. Poets such as Seamus Heaney, Anne Stevenson, Paul Muldoon and Craig Raine have testified to the subtlety and complex beauty of her work. She has been called a poet’s poet, but she is also preeminently a reader’s poet, and a poet whom it is always a serious joy to teach — students come alive when asked to discuss her work, partly because she communicates with an eager, unforced directness, partly because of the wit, pizazz and style with which she writes.

In the 1980s there was a certain resistance to her work: she never came out as a lesbian, refused to appear in all-women anthologies, guarded her privacy and did not take direct political stances like Lowell. She was seen as insufficiently political, a misreading of her work which identifies with black Americans and with the struggle of the poor and oppressed in South America. But she, wisely, does not draw attention to those themes. She designs beautiful cadences, perfect shapes, and then she runs a counter-theme against them: ugliness, bad taste, rough or broken surfaces and sounds infiltrate her paradise of pure form and make it both more ideal and more real.

In Cape Breton, she draws our attention to the weaving “silken water” and then offsets it with “hackmatack”, the name of a hard American spruce much admired by Walt Whitman. She also introduces an “irregular, nervous saw-tooth edge”, and a “rough-edged pole”. A gifted amateur painter, she designs a composition which plays the rough against the smooth, and allows a coded unhappiness and anxiety to disturb the surface of her art.

Bishop’s personal life was often unhappy — two lovers committed suicide — and she became an alcoholic as a young woman. Behind the formal façade of her poems there is a homeless, orphaned imagination whose loneliness was expressed in her insatiable letter-writing and in late-night telephone calls to friends.

She was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 11, 1911. Her mother was from Nova Scotia; her father, who was half Canadian, half American, died eight months after she was born. Her mother became disorientated over the next five years, was diagnosed as insane in 1916 and died in a public sanatorium in 1934. Bishop lived alternately with her grandparents in Nova Scotia and New England, and later with an aunt. She had poor health and hadn’t much formal education until she was 15. In 1930 she went to Vassar College and joined a brilliant generation there.

Bishop impressed everyone she met — she was musical, well read, and was also a painter with a great knowledge of the visual arts. She was a compulsive traveller who manages to avoid all the pitfalls of tourist verse.

Unusually, it is to a single academic essay that we must turn to to understand Bishop’s idea of form and beauty. As an undergraduate she read The Baroque Style in Prose by M. W. Chroll — one of the classic essays on prose style (it can be found in a collection called The English Language, edited by George Watson). Croll’s concept of baroque style — “not a thought, but a mind thinking” — spoke to Bishop like a vocation.

She quoted Croll’s essay in letters to friends because what she admired in the baroque was the “ardour” and dramatic energy and the immediacy of an idea as it was formulated and experienced. The result is a poetry of intense visual and vocal power, where the rhythm, rhyme, spoken inflection and carefully composed images have both spontaneity and deft authority. Their perfect cadences create that “unique feeling of timeliness” which she sought and admired in poetry.If we look at The Bight we can see how finely her imagination works.

Bishop was also a gifted short-story writer (her collected prose has been published), and a marvellous translator. Many of her translations came out of the 15 years she spent in Brazil, where she moved in 1952 to live with Lota de Macedo Soares. She moved back to New York in 1967 and Lota killed herself later that year. Though Bishop continued to travel, she based herself in Boston and died there on October 6, 1979. She is one of the greatest American poets of the last century and is the subject of many books. Twenty-five years after her death her work continues to be deeply influential.

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