The Imaginary Iceberg

Elizabeth Bishop is one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. Though she published only four original volumes of poetry during her lifetime, the originality and refinement of those volumes outshines many of her contemporaries. Bishop’s unique ability to create beauty and narrative through close observation of everyday objects makes her work shine. While poets such as John Berryman and Robert Lowell drew inspiration from their own lives in a confessional form of poetry, Bishop looked outward and engaged with the world.

Bishop wrote much of her first her collection, North & South (1946), while traveling Europe and Northern Africa, and refined the work during a four-year stay in Florida. The tensions between motion and stillness—and between the internal and the external—heavily feature in North & South. Many of the collection’s poems, such as “The Imaginary Iceberg” and “The Fish,” find a way to explore and resolve these tensions.

Poet Biography

Elizabeth Bishop, an only child, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 8, 1911. Her father died when she was eight months old. Bishop’s mother, Gertrude May Bishop, suffered mental illness and was institutionalized when Bishop was five.