| Summary: | This dissertation explores the ways in which Bishop's profound sense of loss permeates much of her work. Specifically, I focus on how Bishop's early loss of her mother and of her family are at the core of her early unpublished and published work and the manner by which this early and intensely personal sense of bereavement becomes a central theme in her work. I begin by examining Bishop's unpublished autobiographical work and her published prose, looking closely at drafts and notebooks from the Vassar College Library and at voluminous correspondences she kept with friends and acquaintances. The opening chapter reveals the extent to which even Bishop's most puzzlingly surrealistic pieces spring from her early autobiographical writing. I then examine each of Bishop's five books of poetry in light of these early writings, and in light of letters and drafts, paying particular attention to the way in which Bishop's vision develops from being mysterious and intensely personal, to being much more inclusive and openly autobiographical. I closely examine individual poems in light of Bishop's early autobiographical concerns, illustrating how the poems spring from the early writings and how they develop the concerns of the particular book in which she published them. While I begin and end by discussing the unavoidable, intensely interesting and ultimately unanswerable questions about the extent to which Bishop's early loss of her mother influenced both her poetic and her sexual identity, the bulk of my dissertation is a close analysis of individual poems and books of poetry. The mystery of Bishop's poetic genius does not reside in her gender or in her losses, but in what she was able to make of what she lost. Ultimately, then, I attempt simply to look closely at Bishop's work--as she herself instructed her readers to do.
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