“The Closet of Breath: Elizabeth Bishop, Her Body and Her Art,” in Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal, Vol. 38, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 152-75.

In the following essay, Lombardi examines the effect of Bishop's numerous illnesses on her poetry.

In 1937, when Elizabeth Bishop was twenty-six, she discovered the wilds of Florida on a fishing expedition and fell in love with the swamps and palm forests of a state that was still a North American wilderness. When she and her friend Louise Crane came to live in Key West the following year, however, their response to the tropical Cayo Hueso, known as the Bone Key, was severely colored by the tragic six-month stay in Europe that intervened between Bishop's first ecstatic visit to Florida and her return.¹ Bishop and her close friends, Crane and Margaret Miller, had been traveling from Burgundy back to Paris when their car was...