Voices & Visions: Elizabeth Bishop

Overview

Elizabeth Bishop’s poems were always admired for the purity and precision of her descriptions, and now readers have come to see how, even in her early poems, the attention to external detail reveals an internal emotional realm. Bishop’s early works use surrealism and imagism to create a new reality in which she minimizes the reference to self in poetry, but her later poems become more autobiographical and more concerned with a quest for personal identity.