““Elizabeth Bishop wrote love poems, and poems about lovemaking, and one of the best poems ever written in English about the loss of love, but she had made her way through life as an orphan, a solitary. Reticence wasn’t the reason she’d become a poet of the self—of a singular “mind in action,” as she’d once described the effect she hoped to achieve in her poems. She had discovered early on, perhaps too early, that she was “an I . . . an Elizabeth”—and she’d treasured that painful, “unlikely” self-awareness ever since, knowing it was the same thing as her imagination.””
![“But she worried about how the older students, who were required to leave the school at age twelve, would find work. Many of these “show[ed] by their unformed features and mechanical movements” the ill effects of having been “treated by wholesale”; they were not accorded the respect that engenders…” quote by Megan Marshall](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/362/megan-marshall-19595_respect_but-she-worried-about-how-the-older-stud_971998.jpg)
