ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Bishop was both gifted with and haunted by childhood memories, yet from the very beginning of her career she refused to see this double inheritance as anything particularly special. This chapter analyses the artistic difficulties involved in trying to express oneself through written memories that repeatedly erase that self from view. Literary historians tend to view artistic careers like Bishop's in terms of simple journeys and trajectories, broken up by one or two eureka moments. Filtered through this narrow perspective, Bishop is usually seen as an impersonal, rather reticent writer who suddenly became more autobiographical in the 1960s and 70s. There is obviously a danger in trying to second-guess Bishop's own feelings about this image. She scrupulously never mentions it in a single letter, or notebook. Bishop was always in two minds about the symbolism of ice and snow. At times, she automatically associated it with past, as if the photograph of her mother was right there before her.
