Elizabeth Bishop at 100

The poet Elizabeth Bishop was born 100 years ago on Feb. 8. Her father died months later, and her mother was institutionalized early in her childhood, so she was raised by relatives in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts.

She became one of the most beloved and important American poets of the 20th century, although her greatest fame came after her death in 1979.

To celebrate her centennial, Farrar Straus & Giroux, her publisher for most of her career, is bringing out three new editions of her writing :

• Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence - her letters to and from The New Yorker
• and a pair of companion volumes called simply Poems and
• Prose

These books make clear that Bishop was as much a prose writer as she was a poet.  Prose is in fact considerably fatter than Poems, which contains all of the The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 plus a selection from the posthumous collections of drafts and fragments.