The Time of Writing

By the time Bishop was preparing to publish her first book of poems, North & South, in 1945, she was aware that the collection might already seem anachronistic since most of the poems had been written before the war and made little reference to it. She wrote to her publishers, Houghton Mifflin, asking them to append a disclaimer to that effect in order to protect her from the ‘reproach’ that she might attract at a time when so much war poetry was being published. She also explained that the reason for the belated appearance of the poems was that ‘I work very slowly’ (OA, 125). This was only one of numerous exchanges she had with her publishers before the book's eventual publication in July 1946, some to do with timing and Bishop's anxieties about possible delays on the part of the publishers, and others about the book's appearance and her desire to exert control over the details of the typography, the binding and the dust jacket. Unlike letters to friends and acquaintances where Bishop's ability to combine her gift for acute observation with a fluent colloquial style has earned her the reputation of being one of the twentieth century's ‘epistolary geniuses’, these letters are often brusque and irritable: