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For most of her writing life, Elizabeth Bishop was known for not wishing to be known. Where other poets muscled heir careers to center-stage, she hovered in the wings. Where others importuned their audience with news of their private sorrows, she remained impressively tight-lipped. A near-contemporary of the so-called confessional poets, poets such as Robert Lowell and John Berryman, she once said of them: "You just wish they'd keep some of these things to themselves."
"Closets, closets and more closets" was Bishop's response to the gay liberation movement. Her friends knew that she was lesbian, and also that she was alcoholic, but she herself liked to believe that each of these dispositions was a secret. Certainly her poems gave no clues. And since Bishop spent most of her career outside the United States, mostly in Brazil, and took little part in homeground literary politics, there was not much word of mouth to go on. Her geographical self-exile seemed perfectly tune with her habits and her demeanor as a poet.
Bishop died in 1979, aged 68, prize-laden and greatly respected by her fellow poets. "A poet's poet's poet" was James Merrill's well-known tag. And yet she was still thought of as somehow marginal to the action. Austere and almost fiddlingly skillful, more interested in places than people, detached almost to the point of authorial invisibility, she was there to be invoked as a cool, neoclassical alternative to the various slacknesses and excesses of the moment: excessive avant-gardism, excessive self-exposure, excessive political engagement and so on. There was nothing excessive about Bishop. For her, it seemed, there was an active virtue to be found in self-forgetfulness, in saying "look at that" instead of "look at me."
And now we have the letters, the biography, the "oral testimony" of acquaintances, onlookers, colleagues, and they reveal a life filled almost to ruination by excess. Drink, sexual passion, sickness, suicides: Bishop, it turns out, had much to hide, or thought she did. At first, it is as if we've been given the low-down on the secret practices of some formidably righteous aunt. After a bit, though, we are glad that we have been told. For primary among Bishop's excesses was a yearning for the non-excessive, for the pleasures and the...