)[5] Effectively orphaned during early childhood, she lived with her maternal grandparents on a farm in Great Village, Nova Scotia, a period she referred to in her writing.

[8] Bishop entered Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in the autumn of 1929, planning to study music in order to become a composer.

[5] In 1933, she co-founded Con Spirito, a rebel literary magazine at Vassar, with writer Mary McCarthy, Margaret Miller, and the sisters Eunice and Eleanor Clark.

After his death, she wrote, "our friendship, [which was] often kept alive through years of separation only by letters, remained constant and affectionate, and I shall always be deeply grateful for it.

Bishop had an independent income from early adulthood, as a result of an inheritance from her deceased father, that did not run out until near the end of her life.

This income allowed her to travel widely, though cheaply, without worrying about employment, and to live in many cities and countries, which are described in her poems.

From 1949 to 1950, she was the Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress, and lived at Bertha Looker's Boardinghouse, 1312 30th Street Northwest, Washington, D.C., in Georgetown.

[19] Upon receiving a substantial ($2,500) traveling fellowship from Bryn Mawr College in 1951, Bishop set off to circumnavigate South America.

She lived in Petrópolis with architect Lota (Maria Carlota) de Macedo Soares, who was descended from a prominent and notable political family.

But in the second section of the volume Bishop also included pieces set in other locations like "In the Village" and "First Death in Nova Scotia", which take place in her native country.

In an outraged piece for The New Republic, Helen Vendler labeled the drafts "maimed and stunted" and rebuked Farrar, Straus and Giroux for choosing to publish the volume.

[27]Where some of her notable contemporaries like Robert Lowell and John Berryman made the intimate details of their personal lives an important part of their poetry, Bishop avoided this practice altogether.

[28] In contrast to this confessional style involving large amounts of self-exposure, Bishop's style of writing, though it did include a small amount of material from her personal life, was known for its highly detailed, objective, and distant point of view, and for its reticence on the kinds of personal subject matter that the work of her contemporaries involved.

She internalized many of the male attitudes of the day toward women, who were supposed to be attractive, appealing to men, and not ask for equal pay or a job with benefits.

In an interview with The Paris Review from 1978, she said that, despite her insistence on being excluded from female poetry anthologies, she still considered herself to be "a strong feminist" but that she only wanted to be judged based on the quality of her writing and not on her gender or sexual orientation.

[5][31] Although generally supportive of the "confessional" style of her friend, Robert Lowell, she drew the line at his highly controversial book The Dolphin (1973), in which he used and altered private letters from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick (whom he divorced after 23 years of marriage), as material for his poems.

In a letter to Lowell, dated March 21, 1972, Bishop strongly urged him against publishing the book: "One can use one's life as material [for poems]—one does anyway—but these letters—aren't you violating a trust?

"[32] Bishop's "In the Waiting Room", written in 1976, addressed the chase for identity and individuality within a diverse society as a seven-year-old girl living in Worcester, Massachusetts, during World War I. Bishop's poem "First Death in Nova Scotia", first published in 1965, describes her first encounter with death when her cousin Arthur died.

After her father's death when she was a baby and following her mother's nervous breakdown when she was five, Bishop's poem notes her experience after she has gone to live with relatives.

Two years after publishing her last book, Geography III (1977),[5] she died of a cerebral aneurysm in her apartment at Lewis Wharf, Boston, and is buried in Hope Cemetery (Worcester, Massachusetts).

[38] Her requested epitaph, the last two lines from her poem "The Bight" — "All the untidy activity continues, / awful but cheerful" — was added, along with her inscription, to the family monument in 1997, on the occasion of the Elizabeth Bishop Conference and Poetry Festival in Worcester.

[39] After her death, the Elizabeth Bishop House, an artists' retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia, was dedicated to her memory.

[40] Reaching for the Moon (2013) is a Brazilian movie about Bishop's life when she was living in Brazil with Lota de Macedo Soares.

[42] Bishop's friendship with Robert Lowell was the subject of the play Dear Elizabeth, by Sarah Ruhl, which was first performed at the Yale Repertory Theater in 2012.

[43] The play was adapted from the two poets' letters which were collected in the book Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

[44] In the television show Breaking Bad, episode 2.13, "ABQ", Jane's father enters her bedroom where there is a photograph of Elizabeth Bishop on the wall.