A Genius Ill-Served

March 24, 2011

April Bernard

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Poems
by Elizabeth Bishop
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 35 pp., $16.00 (paper)                                                  

Prose
by Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Lloyd Schwartz
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 507 pp., $20.00 (paper)                                                  

Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence
edited by Joelle Biele
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 421 pp., $35.00                                                  

One Art/ Elizabeth Bishop
Letters selected and edited by Robert Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994                                                  

Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose & Letters
edited by Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz
Library of America, 2008                                                  

Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments
edited by Alice Quinn
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006                                                  

One wishes only to celebrate the twin volumes of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems and prose, published this year to mark the centenary of her birth. Bishop was one of the great artists of the twentieth century; her poems now tower over the landscape alongside those of Eliot and Stevens. It is no exaggeration to say that her poems get larger and stranger and more overwhelming with every reading. But there is a vexing problem that these new editions raise. One might call it the new biographical fallacy, born of this age of too much information.

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Letters

More From Elizabeth Bishop? May 26, 2011

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