Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop by Susan McCabe provides a comprehensive examination of the poetry and prose of the renowned author. This work of literary criticism and interpretation analyzes how personal loss shapes a fluid sense of self. By exploring unpublished materials, McCabe demonstrates how gender and sexual identity influence the experience of loss within the act of writing.

This study of poetics and psychological aspects of poetry challenges modernist ideas of the impersonal artist. It focuses on how the death of a father and a mother's madness create a rhetoric of uncertainty in the writing of Elizabeth Bishop. Through the lenses of psychoanalysis and literature, the text connects feminist poetics with the history of lesbians in literature to reveal the instability of identity and place.