18 MAYFAIRTIMES.CO.UK
LITERARY FESTIVAL
Mayfair Times will once again be
partnering with The Josephine Hart
Poetry Foundation for our second
Mayfair & St James’s Literary Festival,
from October 28 to November 3. Its
artistic director Shevaun Wilder gives
us the lowdown on a very special
Halloween Poetry Hour at The
London LibraryOF ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911-79),
Josephine Hart wrote, “She came, she saw,
she changed the view.” Josephine believed
Bishop to be “possibly one of the greatest
poets of the 20th century... the poetic
equivalent of a Dalí or De Chirico.”
Bishop was born in Massachusetts to
William and Gertrude Bishop. Her father
died, aged 39, when she was just eight
months old. She was taken by her mother to
live with her grandparents in Nova Scotia,
Canada. When she was five her mother –
after a series of nervous breakdowns – was
admitted to a state mental institution and,
although she lived until 1934, Bishop never
saw her again and was brought up by a series
of relatives.
After graduating from Vassar College,
Bishop travelled extensively and lived in New
York, Florida, Boston and Brazil. These lines
from The Gentleman of Shalott seem to me toTHE JOSEPHINE HART POETRY HOUR:
ELIZABETH BISHOP AND
CHRISTINA ROSSETTIThursday October 31, 6.30-8.30pm
The London Library, 14 St James’s SquareHalloween at the London Library
“...in the silence of the night”speak to her own restlessness and “outsider”
status:
“The uncertainty he says he finds
exhilarating. He loves that sense of constant
re-adjustment.”
And, again, this from One Art:
“The art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like
disaster.”
In her lifetime Bishop published four
volumes of poetry and she was widely
celebrated.
Her first volume, North & South was
published in 1946. She won the Pulitzer
prize for poetry in 1956 for her second
collection, Poems: North & South – A Cold
Spring. In 1976 she was the first woman,
and first American, to receive the Neustadt
international prize for literature. She died
aged 68 in Boston, following a cerebral
aneurysm.