Elizabeth Bishop is considered one of the best American poets of the 20th century. She was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911. Her dad died when she was just a baby and her mom never recovered from the loss. She went to live with her grandparents in Nova Scotia, Canada when she was five. Eventually Bishop attended Vassar College, where she began to write poetry.
At Vassar she discovered Marianne Moore's poetry and met Ms. Moore and began their life-long friendship. She later met poet Robert Lowell. She wrote tons and tons of letters to both of them, which is good for us because we would otherwise(否则) know very little of her personal life. Bishop's poetry is sometimes considered objective and cold because it shows almost nothing about the poet or her life.
Bishop published her first book of poetry in 1946 and wrote until her death in 1979. She would spend years working on a single poem. Her poems are not the result of hasty scribbling(匆忙乱写) on paper while eating breakfast. Over a lifetime of writing, she only published about 275 pages of poetry, and about 40 of those are translations. She would look through drafts(草稿) of poems again and again and improve them until they were as close to perfect as she could get them.
Reading Elizabeth Bishop is like being transported to the very place, the very moment she's writing about. She leads us to a microscope(显微镜)so we can see every smallest part of the scene. It seems she's always asking us to notice more, and more until the poem is so clear in our minds that it's almost painful—like a light that's too bright. It might take your eyes a while to get used to it, but once they do, you'll like what you see.