Lives of the Poet

When a reporter at the American embassy in Brazil called Elizabeth Bishop in 1956 and told her she had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Bishop left her mountaintop home near Rio, entered a neighbour’s kitchen and ate two Oreo cookies, which she hated. “I thought I should do something to celebrate,” she later explained to the Paris Review.

Through quaint anecdotes like this one, the notoriously fastidious poet cultivated, over the years, a reserved if somewhat idiosyncratic persona. Bishop was less candid about her difficult childhood (she was only a baby when her father’s sudden death precipitated her mother’s mental breakdown) and her sexuality (in the same Paris Review interview, she casually alluded to Lota de Macedo Soares, her partner of over 15 years, who died of a tranquillizer overdose soon after Bishop left Brazil, as “a friend”). On the rare occasion that...