Chapter 34 - “My Saving Grace”: On Editing Elizabeth Bishop

Summary

This essay is a narrative of my work on Elizabeth Bishop, beginning with my Ph.D. dissertation (1976) and detailing my choices in the three landmark volumes I edited: Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (University of Michigan Press, 1983) – the first collection of critical work on Bishop, which includes a section of her previously uncollected writing; Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (Library of America, 2008), the first volume to include almost all of her published and major posthumously published and unpublished work; and Elizabeth Bishop: Prose (FSG, 2011), the first substantially complete independent collection of her prose works published to celebrate her centennial, which includes her significant correspondence with poet Anne Stevenson and the closest possible restoration of her book Brazil to what she originally intended, before the editors of Life rewrote it. The chapter ends with the “rescue” of one of her major unpublished poems.