Love unknown : the life and worlds of Elizabeth Bishop / Thomas Travisano.

Includes index.

Between two worlds -- The country mouse -- Were we all touched by Midas? -- Wading in the mud of the celestial gardens -- Walnut Hill -- Con spirito -- This strange world of travel -- The state with the prettiest name -- As our kisses are changing -- The prodigal -- Too many waterfalls -- Samambaia -- "O Prêmio Pulitzer!" -- Apartment in Leme -- No coffee can wake you -- Breakfast song -- The rainbow-bird -- Coda : all the untidy activity continues.

Poets of the twentieth century Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that 'Elizabeth had more talent for life--and for poetry--than anyone else I've known.' This new biography reveals just how she learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters--a remarkable body of work that would make her one of America's most beloved and celebrated poets. In Love Unknown, Thomas Travisano, founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, tells the story of the famous poet and traveler's life. Bishop moved through extraordinary mid-twentieth century worlds with relationships among an extensive international array of literati, visual artists, musicians, scholars, and politicians--along with a cosmopolitan gay underground that was then nearly invisible to the dominant culture. Drawing on fresh interviews and newly discovered manuscript materials, Travisano illuminates that the 'art of losing' that Bishop celebrated with such poignant irony in her poem 'One Art'--perhaps her most famous--was linked in equal part to an 'art of finding,' Bishop's art and life having been devoted to the sort of encounters and epiphanies that so often appear in her work.

English