Prose

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Although Elizabeth Bishop’s admirers have discovered since her death that she attempted to write — and occasionally completed — many more poems than the hundred or so she published during her lifetime, she was nevertheless always a vastly more prolific prose writer than poet. She produced short stories and memoirs, memorials and tributes, book reviews and blurbs. And since she spent much of her life traveling, she also wrote translations, travel essays, a volume on the history and culture of Brazil (where she lived for nearly two decades), and thousands of letters. Like her poems, these all capture her astonishing eye (and ear) for detail and her unmistakable speaking voice: thoughtful, droll, wryly — sometimes scathingly — ironic, loving. From her high school days, she thought deeply about the nature of prose. She admired the way seventeenth-century essayists conveyed “the mind in action,” and that familiar and crucial element of her poems is also present — and began to surface even earlier — in her prose, where her language and imagery often anticipate her poems.

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