Modern-ish Poets: Elizabeth Bishop

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford

Mark and Seamus look at the life and work of Elizabeth Bishop, the east-coast American poet who enjoyed a limited audience, and published relatively little, in her lifetime, but whose reputation has grown enormously since her death. They discuss her exploratory approach to form, the way she domesticates what seem like heroic and mythical enterprises, and the dialectic in her work between the emotional disruption inherited from her childhood and her artistic commitment to perfectionism.

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