American poet whose published output was small — about a hundred poems in four slim books over forty years — and whose reputation has continued to grow since her death. Bishop was orphaned in early childhood (her father died when she was eight months old; her mother was institutionalized when she was five and never released), shuttled between relatives in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, and spent much of her adult life away from the United States: in Key West, in Brazil with the architect Lota de Macedo Soares from 1951 to 1967, and finally in Boston, where she taught at Harvard.
The poems are characterized by an extraordinary precision of observation, a refusal of the confessional even when writing about her own life, and a formal range that runs from the strict villanelle of "One Art" to the open, conversational lines of "The Moose." Marianne Moore, her early mentor, taught her the discipline of the observed particular; her close friendship and lifelong correspondence with Robert Lowell — published as Words in Air (2008) — runs through the major decisions of her writing life and, on the other side, through Lowell's. The contrast between her reserve and his confessional turn is one of the central pairings in postwar American poetry.
Bishop's late masterpiece "In the Waiting Room" (in Geography III, 1976), which records the moment of a child's first apprehension of selfhood as a National Geographic article unfolds in a dentist's waiting room in Worcester, is among the strongest first-person poems in English written without a confessional gesture.