She Mastered the Art of Losing

She seemed in many ways the odd woman out among her generation of U.S. poets, and not only because of her gender. Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) suffered none of the public breakdowns, burnouts and crack-ups that afflicted such talented contemporaries as Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell and Theodore Roethke. "You are the soberest poet we've had here yet," a secretary at the University of Washington once told her; she cherished the comment and repeated it to others. Bishop's public image seemed serene -- photographs taken well into her middle years invariably show small features arranged impassively within a round face -- and she grew famous in part for her fastidious reserve about her own work. She allowed only 80 or so of her poems to be published during her lifetime, and their scarcity -- not to mention their polished, haunting artistry -- made them all the more cherished by her admirers. When she won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1956, she wrote a friend, "I'm sure it's never been given for such a miserable quantity of work before."

What can her private correspondence add to the legacy of her poems? A great deal, as it turns out, including the struggles that lay behind Bishop's quest for perfection. One Art (Farrar Straus Giroux; 668 pages; $35) offers 541 letters selected from the more than 3,000 assembled by her editor Robert Giroux. The book amounts to a kind of daily autobiography, with none of the reshaping that memory can impose. Bishop loved sending and receiving mail. "I sometimes wish," she wrote while a student at Vassar, "that I had nothing, or little more, to do but write letters to the people who are not here." This sentence proved prophetic; by accident or design, she spent much of her life in places where her friends were not.

She recounted in one letter telling her hairdresser, "I was an orphan," and the remark, while technically untrue, was emotionally accurate. Her father died eight months after her birth, a loss that drove her mother into a mental home. The child lived with various relatives, including a spell with her mother's family in Nova Scotia.

Bishop knew even before college that she would be a poet, and the task she set herself while at Vassar -- "to develop a manner of one's own, to say the most difficult things and to be funny if possible" -- remained the same throughout her career. She sought out Marianne Moore as a mentor, but she did not always take the older poet's technical advice: "I'm afraid I was quite ungracious in that I accepted most of your suggestions but refused some -- that seems almost worse than refusing all assistance."

Bishop was blessed and cursed with severe good taste. "I'm rather critical," she told one correspondent with thundering understatement. Her letters regularly registered her dislikes. She called a performance of T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party "a mess." She found "a streak of insensitivity" in the poetry of William Carlos Williams. Not even children's books escaped her opprobrium. After meeting E.B. White, she read a copy of his Charlotte's Web and then reported that it is "so awful." She was hardest of all on her own work. Apologizing for her meager output, she begged Moore, "Can you please forgive me and believe that it is really because I want to do something well that I don't do it at all?"