Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop
Thomas Travisano
From the Publisher:
Description
An illuminating new biography of one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Bishop
“Love Unknown points movingly to the many relationships that moored Bishop, keeping her together even as life—and her own self-destructive tendencies—threatened to split her apart.” —The Wall Street Journal
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.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780525428817 |
| PRICE | $32.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 400 |
My Thoughts
In “Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop,” Thomas Travisano crafts a richly detailed biography that goes beyond chronicling the life of a celebrated poet—it offers insight into the complexities of Elizabeth Bishop’s emotional world, creative mind, and literary friendships. Travisano takes readers on a journey that delves into Bishop’s tumultuous upbringing and the lifelong impacts of losing her parents early in life. The narrative is driven by a deep understanding of how these personal struggles shaped her unique voice in poetry, as she channeled her experiences into an art that was at once personal and universal.
What stands out most is the way Bishop used her craft to process the pain of her life. Travisano expertly weaves together how she constantly reworked real-life events into poems, sometimes over decades, showing a poet’s long and intimate relationship with memory, loss, and artistic transformation. Her famous line, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” is as much about learning to live through adversity as it is about her poetic technique. This biography provides an unparalleled view of how her personal “art of losing” was deeply entwined with her ability to find beauty in the everyday, transforming hardship into art.
Travisano’s work is also notable for highlighting Bishop’s extensive circle of friends, many of whom were iconic figures in 20th-century literature and art. The book illuminates her key relationships, including her connection with Robert Lowell, as well as her navigation of the cosmopolitan gay underground of her time. These relationships, often forged across great distances and through prolific correspondence, were a source of grounding and support for Bishop, who, despite her frequent travels and occasional bouts of alcoholism, maintained a remarkable loyalty and humor in her interactions.
While the book is scholarly, packed with interviews and manuscript discoveries, it remains highly readable. For fans of Bishop’s poetry, it offers an intimate look at the moments and places that inspired her most famous works. For those new to Bishop, “Love Unknown” serves as an accessible and engaging introduction to a poet who continues to influence the literary landscape.
Bottom Line
This is an expertly researched and lovingly told biography of a fascinating literary figure. The hardships that Elizabeth Bishop faced began even before her birth, as her parents’ issues cast a long shadow into her life. Indeed, she faced far more than her fair share of troubles, yet maintained a a wit and playfulness even during the darkest of times. The book is also a fascinating exploration of the poetic mind, tracing how Bishop transformed real-life events into poems, often changing details and revisiting key scenes over and over even as decades passed.
