Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Though Elizabeth Bishop's preference for women has never been in doubt, she actually dated men in her early college years, and she had a thirty-year intellectual romance with fellow poet Robert Lowell through scads of letters and a smattering of in-person meetings. He even proposed at some point during this relationship. Later, Lowell wrote to her and said that proposing to her was the "great might-have-been of his life." (Source.)
Bishop was not only the first woman, but also the only American to win the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. (Source.)
Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. That's WUH-ster. Don't worry, just about everyone living south of Connecticut gets that one wrong. (Source.)
As if Bishop's writing weren't visual enough, filmmaker John Scott has adapted several of her poems into short films.(Source.)