LGBT Book & Video Blog

Books: Worth its weight
The sexual orientation of great American poet Elizabeth Bishop was an open secret. Mary McCarthy used Bishop as the model for the lesbian character in her novel “The Group.” Her lovers helped her with her life-long struggles with alcoholism and asthma. Yet, Bishop, who died in 1978 at 68, had little use for “confessional poetry.” “You just wish [confessional poets would] keep some of these things to themselves,” Bishop told Time magazine in 1967.

Though Bishop said that she believed in “closet, closets, closets,” wry, poignant, yet unsentimental glimpses of her personal life and emotions can be found in a new volume of her writings from the Library of America. This comprehensive (and at 900-plus pages, mammoth) collection “Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters,” is edited by Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz. Giroux was Bishop’s longtime editor and Schwartz is an English professor at Boston University.