The ‘art form’ of Elizabeth Bishop’s letters

Jonathan Ellis is Reader in American Literature at the University of Sheffield, where he has taught for over 20 years.

 

Most of my academic career has focused on the work of American poet, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979). I am the author, editor, and co-editor of several books on her writing, including Reading Elizabeth Bishop (2019), and Elizabeth Bishop in Context (2021). In 2021, in collaboration with Professor Susan Rosenbaum from the University of Georgia, I began a new project on Bishop’s visual arts, initially focusing on her postcards.

 

 

While Bishop’s letter writing is considered central to her art—she famously described letters as ‘an art form’ and taught a course on letters at Harvard—few of the hundreds of postcards she sent during a lifetime of travel had been exhibited or published. Our project began with an exhibition of around 60 of these postcards at Vassar College in Autumn 2023. Alongside a physical and online exhibition, we also created a catalogue.  

 

Bishop studied at Vassar College in the 1930s. Since the early 1980s, Vassar’s Special Collections library has been the main home of her literary archive. In his preface to the catalogue, Ronald Patkus, Head of Special Collections at Vassar and a key collaborator on the project, expressed his wish that ‘publicity surrounding this exhibition may lead to the discovery and possible donation of more Bishop postcards currently lying unseen and unread in private collections and libraries.’

 

The exhibition attracted international attention, including long reviews in The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review. In 2025, it transferred to the Elizabeth Bishop House in Key West, Florida, headquarters of the Key West Literary Seminar; and this spring it will be on display at the Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de la Sorbonne (BIS), in Paris, France.   

 

From the outset, Susan and I were keen to give undergraduate students the opportunity to work with us on the project. We wanted them to experience academic research outside of the classroom, at the same as contributing to the organisation of a public exhibition and publication.  

 

In 2023, we were awarded Student Employability funding by the University of Sheffield to appoint three undergraduate students to assist us in providing accurate transcriptions of over 50 handwritten postcards for the exhibition catalogue and undertaking research for two catalogue appendices. We were looking for students interested in the intersection of twentieth-century poetry and visual art. Transferable skills included an ability to conduct research independently and present findings in a publishable form.

 

We couldn’t have been luckier with the three students we appointed—Kat Ebbs, Grace Hogg, and James Howell—each of whom has written a blog for this series. It is clear from reading their reflections how much they enjoyed and valued the experience. In 2025, I was able to employ a further Editorial Assistant as part of the university’s Internship Programme. The post holder, Miriam Levy, continued the excellent work by the previous year’s students, transcribing previously unpublished postcards for a future trade book of Bishop’s postcards. Miriam has also written a blog. Susan and I are very proud of all their work.