Distinguished Speaker Series: Elizabeth Bishop | A Poet of the Shorelines

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is widely regarded as one of the great poets of the twentieth century, and she is also regarded as one of the most important contributors to Key West’s vibrant literary legacy. David Orr asserted in the New York Times that “in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop.” Bishop, a noted traveler, lived in Key West from 1938 to 1948, and she frequently made the island a focus of her vividly observed poetry and letters. Bishop is understood to be a great landscape poet, but she was also a great poet of the shoreline, and her dynamic shoreline poems function in multiple dimensions, bringing alive her experience of the water, the birds and animal life, the human constructions (such as ships and buildings), the sky, and the sand. Travisano’s talk will explore a series of the shoreline poems Bishop set in Key West, including “Florida,” “Little Exercise,” “The Bight,” and “Seascape”—framing these in the context of a related sequence of shoreline poems she set in Nova Scotia, the Maine coast, Cape Cod, New York Harbor, Brazil, and even in the abstract spaces of a map. Bishop’s shoreline poems provide a vivid portrait of her frequent travels north and south.

Presenter information:

Thomas Travisano is the founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society and the author of the poet’s most recent biography, Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop (2019). He is the principal editor of the acclaimed Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008). Travisano produced the first critical study of Bishop’s entire career, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development (1988) He is also author of the group study Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman (1999). He co-edited Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers (1996) and Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st Century: Reading the New Editions (2013). Travisano also co-edited the three-volume New Anthology of American Poetry. Travisano’s most recent book, The Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon, will be published in fall 2026. Travisano is Emeritus Professor of English at Hartwick College, where he received the Teacher-Scholar award and served as Babcock Professor of English. His work on Love Unknown and other Bishop projects have been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and by awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society.

Sponsored in part by the State of Florida through the Division of Arts and Culture and the National Endowment for the Arts