Awards and Popularity

Elizabeth Bishop - A Website

Awards and Popularity

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Popularity and Critics

Elizabeth Bishop was a poet of observation not of personal preference in her poems. She grew with popularity with readers since she would tend to strive to perfect her work, much like any painter would with a master piece. Elizabeth was not met with much criticism in her life overall, the only time would be when she was in a love relationship with Maria Carlota Costallat de Macedo Soares while living in Brazil. Maria was also a poet who committed suicide which resulted in the inhabitants of Brazil to criticize her poems since they believed she was the reason Maria killed herself.

How she wrote

Elizabeth never struggled with poverty, she was quite self efficient and her works such as “North and South” and “Geography” was some of her most famous works which involved her travels through her life. She was very popular due to her intense description of nature along with her perfection of her work. She never involved politics or personal emotions to swarm over her work. Her works looked deep into the descriptive observation of nature keeping retrains on her emotions and feelings.

Her work and Beyond

Elizabeth won many awards in her lifetime including the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 and a National Book Award in 1970. In addition to her poetry, she translated Brazilian Poetry and wrote short fiction.
Though Elizabeth lived through a literary revolution that affected many of her fellow poet, she remained undisturbed, continuing her work through her quiet life moving from place to place observing. Her poetry seems timeless, since nature never changes over time, the visual observation she portrays can be the same 200 years from now, nature is always the same, it is us humans that change in time.
Cites
“Book of Poetry” – Robert Di Yanni and Kraft Rampf
http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/poets/bishop.php
http://www.poemhunter.com/elizabeth-bishop/