Elizabeth Bishop (Poet)
American poet and writer, increasingly regarded as one of the finest 20th century poets writing in English. "Miss Bishop" — as she preferred most people to address her — was notoriously shy. She did not seek or particularly enjoy literary publicity. Though highly regarded by fellow poets (John Ashbery described her as a "poet's poet’s poet"), it was only after her death in 1979, and particularly after the 1994 publication of One Art, her collected letters, that Bishop's reputation grew well beyond the small critical fame that she enjoyed in her lifetime. Elizabeth Bishop was awarded the Houghton Mifflin poetry award in 1946 and, in 1956, the Pulitzer Prize for her collection of poetry, North & South - A Cold Spring. She later received the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as two Guggenheim fellowships. In 1976, she became the first woman to receive the International Neustadt Prize for Literature, and remains the only American to be awarded that prize.
Ezra Pound (Poet)
American poet, editor and critic, considered one of the originators of 20th Century literary modernism. A fiercely individual rebel (W.B. Yeats called him a "solitary volcano") Pound challenged many of the common views of his time, all along maintaining that poetry is the highest of arts. He was a tireless and generous advocate of fellow writers whom he considered worthy, including T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Elizabeth Bishop's own mentor Marianne Moore. Devastated by the slaughter of World War I, Pound sought economic explanations for the carnage, theories of an increasingly anti-Semitic character. In the nineteen-thirties, living in Italy, he embraced Mussolini and Fascism. His broadcasts over Rome Radio in the forties led to his arrest and, when he was found unfit to stand trial for treason, to his being remanded to St Elizabeths, a Federal mental hospital in Washington where Bishop visited him in 1949. Pound's major work was the Cantos, which was published in ten sections between 1925 and 1969, and then as a one-volume collected edition, The Cantos Of Ezra Pound I-CXVII (1970).