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Love Unknown

The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop

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 An illuminating new biography of one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Bishop

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," that Bishop's art and life was devoted to the sort of encounters and epiphanies that so often appear in her work.


Cover photograph: courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College Art & Literature Artists, Architects & Photographers Authors Literary History & Criticism
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This biography is fantastic. The narration of it is horrendous. Why did Brandon Pinchot chose to put on a high pitch weak voice every time he quotes from Elizabeth Bishop? It’s the most patronising, inappropriate narration I’ve ever heard. How it got past the editor I have no idea. Gave up and brought the book instead a read it.

Great book. The worst narration I’ve ever heard.

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Great view into Bishop’s life, and I appreciated the biographical insight into her poetry. The incorporation of Bessel van der Kolk’s ideas of how trauma affects the body was apt. Both Bishop’s life/treatment as a woman in the world of poetry, as well as her relationship with alcohol, was almost an afterthought. Seems like glaring omissions but nevertheless a valuable work overall. The narrator was an odd choice, and voiced Bishop as frail and vulnerable rather than the wry and resilient woman the biography seems to present her as. He seems uncomfortable with foreign words too. It didn’t prevent me from enjoying the biog, but was a little distracting.

Moving Biography

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