The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article and discuss the issue on the talk page. (December 2010)

Henry Oliver Walker, Lyric Poetry (1896). Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.

Lyric poet is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were sung, accompanied by a lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat.^[1] Aristotle, in Poetics 1447a, mentions lyric poetry (kitharistike played to the cithara, a type of lyre) along with drama, epic poetry, dancing, painting and other forms of mimesis. The lyric poem, dating from the Romantic era, does have some thematic antecedents in ancient Greek and Roman verse, but the ancient definition was based on metrical criteria, and in archaic and classical Greek culture presupposed live performance accompanied by a stringed instrument.

Forms[link]

Although arguably the most popular form of poetry in the Western tradition is the 14-line sonnet, either in its Petrarchan or its Shakespearean form, lyric poetry appears in a variety of forms. Other forms of the lyric include ballades,^[2] villanelles,^[2] odes, pastourelle and canzone.

Ancient Hebrew poetry relied on repetition, alliteration, and chiasmus for many of its effects. Ancient Greek and Roman lyric poetry was composed in strophes. Pindar's epinician odes, where strophe and antistrophe are followed by an epode, represent an expansion of the same basic principle. The Greeks distinguished, however, between lyric monody (e.g. Sappho, Anacreon) and choral lyric (e.g. Pindar, Bacchylides). In all such poetry the fundamental formal feature is the repetition of a metrical pattern larger than a verse or distich. In some cases (although not in antiquity), form and theme are wed in the conception of a genre, as in the medieval alva or aubade, a dawn song in which lovers must part after a night of love, often with the watchman's refrain telling them it is time to go. A common feature of some lyric forms is the refrain of one or more verses that end each strophe. The refrain is repeated throughout the poem, either exactly or with variation. In the medieval Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo, thought to reflect an old oral tradition, 90% of the texts have a refrain.^[3]

Meters[link]

Much lyric poetry depends on regular meter based either on number of syllables or on stress. The most common meters are as follows:

• Iambic - two syllables, with the short or unstressed syllable followed by the long or stressed syllable.
• Trochaic - two syllables, with the long or stressed syllable followed by the short or unstressed syllable. In English, this metre is found almost entirely in lyric poetry.^[4]
• Pyrrhic - Two unstressed syllables
• Anapestic - three syllables, with the first two short or unstressed and the last long or stressed.
• Dactylic - three syllables, with the first one long or stressed and the other two short or unstressed.
• Spondaic - two syllables, with two successive long or stressed syllables.

Some forms have a combination of meters, often using a different meter for the refrain.

History of lyric poetry[link]

The Classical period[link]

Greece[link]

Alcaeus of Mytilene and Sappho, Attic red-figure kalathos, ca. 470 BC, Staatliche Antikensammlungen (Inv. 2416)

For the ancient Greeks, lyric poetry had a precise technical meaning: verse that was accompanied by a lyre or other stringed instrument (e.g. the barbitos). The lyric poet was distinguished from the writer of plays (although Athenian drama included choral odes, in lyric form), the writer of trochaic and iambic verses (which were recited), the writer of elegies (accompanied by the flute, rather than the lyre) and the writer of epic.^[5] The scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria created a canon of nine lyric poets deemed especially worthy of critical study. These archaic and classical musician-poets included Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon and Pindar. Archaic lyric was characterized by strophic composition and live musical performance. Some poets, like Pindar extended the metrical forms to a triad, including strophe, antistrophe (metrically identical to the strophe) and epode (whose form does not match that of the strophe).^[6]

Rome[link]

Among the major extant Roman poets of the classical period, only Catullus (nos. 11, 17, 30, 34, 51, 61) and Horace (four books of Odes) wrote lyric poetry, which however was no longer meant to be sung, but read or recited. What remained were the forms, the lyric meters of the Greeks adapted to Latin. Catullus was influenced by both archaic and Hellenistic Greek verse and belonged to a group of Roman poets called the Neoteroi ("newer poets"), who spurned epic poetry, following the lead of Callimachus, and instead composed brief highly polished poems in various thematic and metrical genres. The Roman love elegy of Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid (Amores, Heroides), with its focus on the poetic "I" and the expression of personal feeling, may be the thematic ancestor of much medieval, renaissance, Romantic and modern lyric poetry, but these works were composed in elegiac couplets, and so were not lyric poetry in the ancient sense.^[7]

China[link]

In China, an anthology of poems by Qu Yuan and Song Yu, Songs of Chu, defined a new form of poetry that came from the area of Chu during the Warring States period. As a new literary style, chu ci abandoned the classic four-character verses used in poems of Shi Jing and adopted verses with varying lengths. This gave it more rhythm and latitude in expression.

Middle Ages[link]

Originating in 10th century Persian, a ghazal is a poetic form consisting of couplets that share a rhyme and a refrain. Formally it consists of a short lyric composed in a single metre with a single rhyme throughout. The central subject is love. Notable exponents include: Hafiz, Amir Khusro, Auhadi of Maragheh, Alisher Navoi, Obeid e zakani, Khaqani Shirvani, Anvari, Farid al-Din Attar, Omar Khayyam, and Rudaki. The ghazal was a introduced to European poetry in the early 19th century by the German writers Friedrich Schlegel, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who called Hafiz his "twin".^[8]

Lyric in European literature of the medieval or Renaissance period means a poem written so that it could be set to music—whether or not it is. A poem's particular structure, function or theme is not specified by the term.^[9] The lyric poetry of Europe in this period was created largely without reference to the classical past, by the pioneers of courtly poetry and courtly love.^[10] The troubadors, travelling composers and performers of songs, began to flourish towards the end of the 11th century and were often imitated in successive centuries. Trouvères were poet-composers who were roughly contemporary with and influenced by the troubadours but who composed their works in the northern dialects of France. The first known trouvère was Chrétien de Troyes (fl. 1160s-80s). The dominant form of German lyric poetry in the period was the Minnesang, "a love lyric based essentially on a fictitious relationship between a knight and his high-born lady".^[11] Initially imitating the lyrics of the French troubadours and trouvères, Minnesang soon established a distinctive tradition.^[12] There is also a large body of medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric.^[13]

A bhajan or kirtan is a Hindu devotional song. Bhajans are often simple songs in lyrical language expressing emotions of love for the Divine. Notable exponents include: Kabir, Surdas and Tulsidas. Hebrew singer-poets of the Middle Ages include: Yehuda Halevi, Solomon ibn Gabirol and Abraham ibn Ezra.

Chinese Sanqu poetry was a Chinese poetic genre from the Jin Dynasty, 1115–1234, through the Yuan Dynasty, (1271–1368), to the following Ming period. Playwrights like Ma Zhiyuan (c. 2170-1330) and Guan Hanqing (c. 1300) were well-established writers of Sanqu Dramatic Lyrics. This poetry was composed in the vernacular or semi-vernacular.

In Italy, Petrarch developed the sonnet form pioneered by Giacomo da Lentini, which Dante used in his Vita Nuova. In 1327, according to the poet, the sight of a woman called Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon awoke in him a lasting passion, celebrated in the Rime sparse ("Scattered rhymes"). Later, Renaissance poets who copied Petrarch's style named this collection of 366 poems Il Canzoniere ("Song Book"). Laura is in many ways both the culmination of medieval courtly love poetry and the beginning of Renaissance love lyric.

16th Century[link]

Thomas Campion wrote lute songs. Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare helped popularize the sonnet. The Naga-Uta is a lyric poem, popular in this era, in alternating five and seven lines and ending with an extra seven-syllable line (see also the earlier choka version).

In France, La Pléiade aimed to break with earlier traditions of French poetry (especially Marot and the grands rhétoriqueurs), and, maintaining that French was a worthy language for literary expression, to attempt to ennoble the French language by imitating the Ancients. Among the models favoured by the Pléiade were Pindar, Anacreon, Alcaeus, Horace and Ovid. The forms that dominate the poetic production of these poets are the Petrarchan sonnet cycle and the Horatian/Anacreontic ode. The group included: Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay and Jean-Antoine de Baïf. Spanish devotional poetry adapts the lyric for religious purposes. Notable poets include: Teresa of Avila, Saint John of the Cross, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Garcilaso de la Vega, Lope de Vega. Although better known for his epic Lusiadas, Luís de Camões is also considered the greatest Portuguese lyric poet of the period.

17th Century[link]

Lyric is the dominant poetic idiom in 17th century English poetry from John Donne to Andrew Marvell.^[14] The poems of this period are short, rarely tell a story and are intense in expression.^[14] Other notable poets of the era include Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, George Herbert, Aphra Behn, Thomas Carew, John Suckling, Richard Lovelace, John Milton, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughan. A German lyric poet of the period is Martin Opitz. Matsuo Bashō is a Japanese lyric poet.

18th Century[link]

In the 18th century lyric poetry declined in England and France. The atmosphere of the English coffee-house or French salon, where literature was discussed, was not congenial to lyric poetry.^[15] Exceptions include the lyrics of Robert Burns, William Cowper, Thomas Gray and Oliver Goldsmith. German lyric poets of the period include Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Novalis, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Heinrich Voß. Kobayashi Issa is a Japanese lyric poet.

19th Century[link]

Portrait of William Wordsworth, 1842, by Benjamin Haydon

In Europe the lyric emerges as the principal poetic form of the 19th century, and comes to be seen as synonymous with poetry.^[16] Romantic lyric poetry consists of first-person accounts of the thoughts and feelings of a specific moment; feelings are extreme, but personal.^[17]

The traditional form of the sonnet is revived in Britain, with William Wordsworth writing more sonnets than any other British poet.^[16] Other important Romantic lyric writers of the period include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron. Later in the century the Victorian lyric is more linguistically self-conscious and defensive than the Romantic lyric.^[18] Victorian lyric poets include Alfred Lord Tennyson and Christina Rossetti.

Lyric poetry was popular with the German reading public between 1830 and 1890, as shown in the number of poetry anthologies published in the period.^[19] According to Georg Lukács, the verse of Joseph von Eichendorff exemplifies the German Romantic revival of the folk-song tradition, initiated by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder and receiving new impetus with the publication of Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano's collection of Folk Songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn.^[20]

The 19th century in France sees a confident recovery of the lyric voice after its relative demise in the 18th century.^[21] The lyric becomes the dominant mode in French poetry of this period.^[22] Charles Baudelaire is, for Walter Benjamin, the last European example of lyric poetry "successful on a mass scale."^[23]

The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries constitute the period of the rise of Russian lyric poetry, exemplified by Aleksandr Pushkin.^[24] The Swedish "Phosphorists" were influenced by the Romantic movement and their chief poet, Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom produced many lyric poems.^[25] Italian lyric poets of the period include Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D'Annunzio. Japanese lyric poets include Taneda Santoka, Masaoka Shiki and Ishikawa Takuboku. Spanish lyric poets include Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rosalía de Castro and José de Espronceda.

20th Century[link]

Recited Portuguese lyric Poetry

In the early years of the 20th century rhymed lyric poetry, usually expressing the feelings of the poet, was the dominant poetic form in America,^[26] Europe and the British colonies. The English Georgian poets such as A. E. Housman, Walter de la Mare and Edmund Blunden used the lyric form. The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was praised by William Butler Yeats for his lyric poetry and compared with the troubadour poets, when the two met in 1912.^[27]

The relevance and acceptability of the lyric in the modern age was, though, called into question by modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D. and William Carlos Williams, who rejected the English lyric form of the 19th century, feeling that it relied too heavily on melodious language, rather than complexity of thought.^[28] After World War II, the American New Criticism returned to the lyric, advocating a poetry that made conventional use of rhyme, meter and stanzas, and was modestly personal in the lyric tradition.^[29] Lyric poetry dealing with relationships, sex and domestic life constituted the new mainstream of American poetry in the late 20th century, influenced by the confessional poets of the 1950s and 60s, such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.^[30]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Lyrical poetry.

• Wilhelm, James J., (editor), Lyrics of the Middle Ages : an anthology, New York : Garland Pub., 1990. ISBN 0-8240-7049-6

Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was an American poet, short-story writer, and recipient of the 1976 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956^[1] and the National Book Award winner in 1970.^[2] Elizabeth Bishop House is an artists' retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia dedicated to her memory. She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century.^[3]

Life and career[link]

Early years[link]

Elizabeth Bishop, an only child, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. After her father, a successful builder, died when she was eight months old, Bishop’s mother became mentally ill and was institutionalized in 1916.^[4] (Bishop wrote about the time of her mother's struggles in her short story "In The Village.") Effectively orphaned during her very early childhood, she lived with her grandparents on a farm in Great Village, Nova Scotia, a period she also referenced in her writing. This was also where she developed into a first-class fisherwoman. Bishop's mother remained in an asylum until her death in 1934, and the two were never reunited.^[5] Later in childhood, Bishop's paternal family gained custody, and she was removed from the care of her grandparents and moved in with her father's wealthier family in Worcester, Massachusetts. However, Bishop was unhappy in Worcester, and her separation from her grandparents made her lonely. While she was living in Worcester, she developed chronic asthma, from which she suffered for the rest of her life.^[4] Her time in Worcester is briefly chronicled in her poem "In The Waiting Room."

Bishop boarded at the Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts, where she studied music.^[4] At the school her first poems were published by her friend Frani Blough in a student magazine.^[6] Then she entered Vassar College in the fall of 1929, shortly before the stock market crash, planning to be a composer. She gave up music because of a terror of performance and switched to English where she took courses including 16th and 17th century literature and the novel.^[4] Bishop published her work in her senior year in The Magazine (based in California)^[4] and 1933, she co-founded Con Spirito, a rebel literary magazine at Vassar, with writer Mary McCarthy (one year her senior), Margaret Miller, and the sisters Eunice and Eleanor Clark.^[7] Bishop graduated in 1934.

Influences[link]

Bishop was greatly influenced by the poet Marianne Moore^[8] to whom she was introduced by a librarian at Vassar in 1934. Moore took a keen interest in Bishop’s work, and at one point Moore dissuaded Bishop from attending Cornell Medical School, in which the poet had briefly enrolled herself after moving to New York City following her Vassar graduation. It was four years before Bishop addressed "Dear Miss Moore" as "Dear Marianne," and only then at the elder poet’s invitation. The friendship between the two women, memorialized by an extensive correspondence (see One Art), endured until Moore's death in 1972. Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" (1955) contains allusions on several levels to Moore's 1924 poem "A Grave." ^[9]

She was introduced to Robert Lowell by Randall Jarrell in 1947 and they became great friends, mostly through their written correspondence, until Lowell's death in 1977. After his death, she wrote, "our friendship, [which was] often kept alive through years of separation only by letters, remained constant and affectionate, and I shall always be deeply grateful for it".^[10] They also both influenced each other's poetry. Lowell cited Bishop's influence on his poem "Skunk Hour" which he said, "[was] modeled on Miss Bishop's 'The Armadillo.'"^[11] Also, his poem "The Scream" is "derived from...Bishop's story In the Village."^[12] "North Haven," one of the last poems she published during her lifetime, was written in memory of Lowell in 1978.

Travel and success[link]

Bishop had an independent income in early adulthood as a result of an inheritance from her deceased father that did not run out until the end of her life.^[4]With this inheritance, Bishop was able to travel widely without worrying about employment and lived in many cities and countries which are described in her poems.^[13] She lived in France for several years in the mid-1930s with a friend she knew at Vassar, Louise Crane, who was a paper-manufacturing heiress. In 1938, Bishop purchased a house with Crane at 624 White Street in Key West, Florida. While living there Bishop made the acquaintance of Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, who had divorced Ernest Hemingway in 1940.

1312 & 1314 30th Street NW, (built 1868)

In 1949 to 1950, she was Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress, and lived at Bertha Looker's Boardinghouse, 1312 30th Street Northwest, Washington, D.C., in Georgetown.^[14] In 1946, Marianne Moore suggested Bishop for the Houghton Mifflin Prize for poetry, which Bishop won. Her first book, North & South, was published in 1,000 copies. The book prompted the literary critic Randall Jarrell to write that “all her poems have written underneath, 'I have seen it,'" referring to Bishop's talent for vivid description.^[15]

Upon receiving a substantial $2,500 traveling fellowship from Bryn Mawr College in 1951, Bishop set off to circumnavigate South America by boat. Arriving in Santos, Brazil in November of that year, Bishop expected to stay two weeks but stayed fifteen years. She lived in Pétropolis with architect Lota de Macedo Soares, descended from a prominent and notable political family.^[16] While living in Brazil, Bishop won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for the collection Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring, which combined her first two books.^[1] Although Bishop was not forthcoming about details of her romance with Soares, much of their relationship was documented in Bishop's extensive correspondence with Samuel Ashley Brown. However, in its later years, the relationship deteriorated, becoming volatile and tempestuous, marked by bouts of depression, tantrums and alcoholism.^[17]

It was during her time in Brazil that Elizabeth Bishop became increasingly interested in the languages and literatures of Latin America.^[18] She was influenced by South and Central American poets, including the Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, as well as the Brazilian poets João Cabral de Melo Neto and Carlos Drummond de Andrade and translated their work into English. Regarding de Andrade, she said, "I didn't know him at all. He's supposed to be very shy. I'm supposed to be very shy. We've met once — on the sidewalk at night. We had just come out of the same restaurant, and he kissed my hand politely when we were introduced."^[19] After Soares took her own life in 1967 Bishop spent more time in the US.^[20][21]

Literary style and identity[link]

Bishop did not see herself as a "lesbian poet" or as a "female poet." Although she still considered herself to be "a strong feminist," she only wanted to be judged based on the quality of her writing and not on her gender or sexual orientation.^[4][22] Also, where some of her notable contemporaries like Robert Lowell and John Berryman made the intimate, often sordid details of their personal lives an important part of their poetry, Bishop avoided this practice altogether.^[23] For instance, like Berryman, Bishop struggled with alcoholism and depression throughout her adult life; but Bishop never wrote about this struggle (whereas Berryman made his alcoholism and depression a focal point in his dream song poems).

In contrast to this confessional style involving large amounts of self-exposure, Bishop's style of writing, though it sometimes involved sparse details from her personal life, was known for its highly detailed and objective, distant point of view and for its reticence on the sordid subject matter that obsessed her contemporaries. In contrast to a poet like Lowell, when Bishop wrote about details and people from her own life (as she did in her story about her childhood and her mentally unstable mother in "In the Village"), she always used discretion.

Although she was generally supportive of the "confessional" style of her friend, Robert Lowell, she drew the line at Lowell's highly controversial book The Dolphin (1973), in which he used and altered private letters from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick (whom he'd recently divorced after 23 years of marriage), as material for his poems. In a letter to Lowell, dated March 21, 1972, Bishop strongly urged him against publishing the book, writing, "One can use one's life as material [for poems]--one does anyway—but these letters—aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn't changed them. . .etc. But art just isn't worth that much."^[24]

Later career[link]

In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize, Bishop won the National Book Award^[2] and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as two Guggenheim Fellowships and an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. In 1976, she became the first woman to receive the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and remains the only American to be awarded that prize.^[25]

Bishop lectured in higher education for a number of years starting in the 1970s when her inheritance began to run out.^[26] For a short time she taught at the University of Washington, before teaching at Harvard University for seven years. She often spent her summers in her summer house in the island community of North Haven, Maine. She taught at New York University, before finishing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She commented "I don’t think I believe in writing courses at all… It’s true, children sometimes write wonderful things, paint wonderful pictures, but I think they should be discouraged." ^[4]

In 1971 Bishop began a relationship with Alice Methfessel.^[27] Never a prolific writer, Bishop noted that she would begin many projects and leave them unfinished. She published her last book in 1976, Geography III.^[4] Three years later, she died of a cerebral aneurysm in her apartment at Lewis Wharf, Boston. She is buried in Hope Cemetery in Worcester, Massachusetts.^[28] Alice Methfessel was her literary executor.^[27]

Works by Bishop[link]

Poetry collections

• North & South (Houghton Mifflin, 1946)
• Poems: North & South. A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1955) —winner of the Pulitzer Prize^[1]
• A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1956)
• Questions of Travel (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965)
• The Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969) —winner of the National Book Award^[2]
• Geography III, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976)
• The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983)
• Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop ed. Alice Quinn, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006)

Other works

• The Diary of Helena Morley by Alice Brant, translated and with an Introduction by Elizabeth Bishop, (Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957)
• The Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968)
• An Anthology of Twentieth Century Brazilian Poetry edited by Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil, (Wesleyan University Press (1972)
• The Collected Prose (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984)
• One Art: Letters selected and edited by Robert Giroux, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994)
• Exchanging Hats: Elizabeth Bishop Paintings, edited and with an Introduction by William Benton, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996)
• Poems, Prose and Letters Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz, eds. (New York: Library of America, 2008)
• Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano, Saskia Hamilton (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008)
• Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop. George Monteiro Ed. (University Press of Mississippi 1996)

Awards and honors[link]

• 1945: Houghton Mifflin Poetry Prize Fellowship
• 1947: Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1949: Appointed Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress
• 1950: American Academy of Arts and Letters Award
• 1951: Lucy Martin Donelly Fellowship (awarded by Bryn Mawr College)
• 1953: Shelley Memorial Award
• 1954: Elected to lifetime membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters
• 1956: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry^[1]
• 1960: Chapelbrook Foundation Award
• 1964: Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• 1968: Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences^[29]
• 1968: Ingram-Merrill Foundation Grant
• 1969: The Order of the Rio Branco (awarded by the Brazilian government)
• 1970: National Book Award for Poetry^[2]
• 1974: Harriet Monroe Poetry Award
• 1976: Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize
• 1976: Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 1977: National Book Critics Circle Award
• 1978: Guggenheim Fellowship

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Costello, Bonnie (1991). Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-24689-6. 
• Kalstone, David (1989). Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. ISBN 0-374-10960-5. 
• Millier, Brett (1993). Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07978-7. 
• Nickowitz, Peter. Rhetoric and Sexuality: The Poetry of Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill. Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2006.
• Oliveira, Carmen L., trans Neil K. Besner, (2002) Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares (Rutgers University Press, 2002) ISBN 0-8135-3359-7
• Page, Chester (2007). Memoirs of a Charmed Life in New York. iUniverse. p. 77. ISBN 978-0-595-69771-7. http://www.amazon.com/Memoirs-Charmed-Life-New-York/dp/0595456383. 
• Schwartz, Lloyd and Estess, Sybil P. (1983) Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art University of Michigan Press ISBN 0-472-06343-X
• Travisano, Thomas (1988). Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ISBN 0-8139-1159-1. 

External links[link]

Elizabeth Bishop at Find a Grave

Profiles[link]

• Profile at the National Book Foundation Poetry Blog
• Profile at the Poetry Archive with poems written and audio
• Profile and poems at Poets.org
• Profile and poems at the Poetry Foundation
• Profile and works at Modern American Poetry.

Articles and critical analysis[link]

• "Hemingway, Bishop and Key West: Two Writers’ Perspectives", Thomas Travisano, Berfrois, June 15, 2011
• Helen Vendler phone interview on Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop audio podcast from The New York Review of Books. (Audio, 28 mins) Accessed 2010-09-11
• "Elizabeth Bishop, The Art of Poetry No. 27". Interview in Paris Review Summer 1981 No. 80
• "'Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters" April 29, 2008 (audio file 22 mins) from NPR and "Poets' Letters Describe A Love Of Words" December 14, 2008
• "Casual Perfection: Why did the publication of Elizabeth Bishop's drafts cause an uproar?" June 13, 2006. Slate Magazine
• Works on Paper: the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell The New Yorker 84/35 (November 3, 2008) : 106–110 Retrieved 2008-04-25
• "The Politics of Editing Bishop’s 1962 Brazil Volume for Life World Library", Angus Cleghorn, Berfrois, September 20, 2011
• Yale College Lecture on Elizabeth Bishop audio, video and full transcripts from Open Yale Courses. (Audio file, Lecture 24). Yale lecture continued, (Audio file, Lecture 25)

Archive[link]

• The Elizabeth Bishop Papers at Washington University in St. Louis Retrieved 2008-04-25
• Works by or about Elizabeth Bishop in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Martha Wainwright
Martha Wainwright performing at The Cambridge Folk Festival 2008
Background information
Born	(1976-05-08) May 8, 1976 (age 36)
Origin	Montreal
Genres	Folk, Pop
Occupations	Singer-songwriter
Years active	1996–present
Associated acts	Loudon Wainwright III, Suzzy Roche, The Roches, Rufus Wainwright, Sloan Wainwright
Website	Official website

Martha Wainwright (born May 8, 1976) is a Canadian-American folk-rock singer-songwriter. She is the daughter of American folk singer and actor Loudon Wainwright III and Canadian folk singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle. She was raised in a musical family along with her older brother, Rufus Wainwright, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Early musical development[link]

Wainwright released an independent cassette, Ground Floor, in 1997. The following year, her song "Year of the Dragon" appeared on The McGarrigle Hour, an album released by Kate and Anna McGarrigle. Shortly after this recording, Martha began singing backup vocals for her brother, and released the six-song EP Martha Wainwright in 1999.

Following her drama classes at Montreal's Concordia University, she moved to New York City, where she established herself as singer and songwriter. She made contacts within the industry, one of whom was producer Brad Albetta, who worked with Wainwright to produce her self-titled debut album, Martha Wainwright (released April 12, 2005, by MapleMusic Recordings).

Albetta worked again with Wainwright to produce her second album, I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too, released in Canada on June 10, 2008. Artists contributing to the album include Pete Townshend (The Who), Donald Fagen (Steely Dan), Garth Hudson (The Band), as well as her mother, brother and aunt.

Wainwright is signed with the independent record labels Rounder Records in the United States, DiS in the United Kingdom, MapleMusic Recordings in Canada, V2 Records in Europe and Shock Records in Australia.

She performed "Tower of Song" and "The Traitor" at the Cohen tribute concert which became the film and album Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man.

Performance and media attention[link]

In 2001, Wainwright recorded "Star Crossed Lovers" with Propellerheads for the Red Hot Organization's compilation album Red Hot + Indigo, a tribute to Duke Ellington, which raised money for various charities devoted to increasing AIDS awareness and fighting the disease

Since the release of her album, I Know You're Married..., Wainwright toured in Europe, Canada, the United States and Australia. She has positive reviews; Tricia Summers, of Spin.com, describes Wainwright's stage presence, of July 23, 2008, as: "Slowly strumming her guitar and along on stage with a powerful voice, she knew she had the crowd wrapped around her finger."

Wainwright has received positive reviews for her performances.^[1] She appeared at the 2007 Bonnaroo and at Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival, Inverness-shire in August 2007. She duetted with Snow Patrol at the V Festival and Lollapalooza, and performed with her brother at the Hollywood Bowl in September 2007.

Annie Lennox joined Wainwright and 22 female artists to raise awareness of the transmission of HIV to unborn children in Africa. The single "Sing" was released on World AIDS Day on December 1, 2007, when Lennox appeared at the Nelson Mandela 46664 concert in South Africa.

She recorded the song "Set the Fire to the Third Bar" with Snow Patrol in 2006.

In May 2007 Martha Wainwright her mother, Kate McGarrigle and cousin Lily Lanken performed "Golden Hair" and "See Emily Play" at the Syd Barrett memorial concert at the Barbican Centre in London.

In 2010, Martha contributed background vocals on Hole's album Nobody's Daughter.

Personal life[link]

She married her producer Brad Albetta in September 2007. They have a son, Arcangelo, born at University College Hospital, London on November 16, 2009.^[2]

Discography[link]

• Martha Wainwright (2005)
• I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too (2008)
• Sans Fusils, Ni Souliers, à Paris: Martha Wainwright's Piaf Record (2009)

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Martha Wainwright

• Official site
• Martha Wainwright at Myspace
• Interview with Martha Wainwright at Sundance London premiere of Sing Me The Songs That Say I Love You