Word: bishops
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What can her private correspondence add to the legacy of her poems? A great deal, as it turns out, including the struggles that lay behind Bishop's quest for perfection. One Art (Farrar Straus Giroux; 668 pages; $35) offers 541 letters selected from the more than 3,000 assembled by her editor Robert Giroux. The book amounts to a kind of daily autobiography, with none of the reshaping that memory can impose. Bishop loved sending and receiving mail. "I sometimes wish," she wrote while a student at Vassar, "that I had nothing, or little more, to do but write letters...
...Bishop knew even before college that she would be a poet, and the task she set herself while at Vassar -- "to develop a manner of one's own, to say the most difficult things and to be funny if possible" -- remained the same throughout her career. She sought out Marianne Moore as a mentor, but she did not always take the older poet's technical advice: "I'm afraid I was quite ungracious in that I accepted most of your suggestions but refused some -- that seems almost worse than refusing all assistance...
...Bishop was blessed and cursed with severe good taste. "I'm rather critical," she told one correspondent with thundering understatement. Her letters regularly registered her dislikes. She called a performance of T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party "a mess." She found "a streak of insensitivity" in the poetry of William Carlos Williams. Not even children's books escaped her opprobrium. After meeting E.B. White, she read a copy of his Charlotte's Web and then reported that it is "so awful." She was hardest of all on her own work. Apologizing for her meager output, she begged Moore...
...pivotal discovery came in 1976, when Drs. J. Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus at the University of California, San Francisco, made a startling observation. They saw that a viral gene known to cause cancer in chickens was practically a carbon copy of a normal gene found in animal and human cells. The virus had somehow stolen a perfectly good gene and put it to bad use. This finding helped lead to a general conclusion: cells become cancerous because their normal genetic machinery goes awry. The culprits that initiate the damage can be viruses, radiation, environmental poisons, defective genes inherited from...
Books: Elizabeth Bishop's letters trace a poet's life...