Gift For You - Poetry

the Vassar librarian, arranged an introduction. Miss Bishop described the meeting thus: "I first met Miss Moore by appointment in 1934, in the New York Public Library. I had actually picked out a tall, eagle-nosed, beturbaned lady, distinguished-looking but proud and forbidding, as a possible Miss Moore, when to my great relief, the real one spoke up." In the course of their conversation, the Vassar senior suggested they go to the circus in two weeks and Miss Moore, who had a passion for the circus, agreed.

The older poet played at least a tangential role in the following year in Miss Bishop's decision not to enroll in Cornell Medical School. As she explained, "I had all the forms. But then I discovered that I would have to take German and more chemistry. I'd already published a few things and Marianne discouraged me, and I didn't go. I just went off to Europe instead." Miss Bishop traveled extensively in Europe and lived in New York, Key West, Florida, and, for seventeen years, in Brazil. She taught briefly at the University of Washington at Harvard for seven years, at New York University, and just prior to her death in 1979, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Elizabeth Bishop won virtually every poetry prize in the country although she insisted, "They don't mean too much." Her first book, North & South, won the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Award for 1946. In 1955, she received the Pulitzer Prize for a volume containing North & South and A Cold Spring. Her next book of poetry, Questions of Travel (1965), won the National Book Award and was followed by The Complete Poems 410