Elizabeth Bishop and Shore's Early History

From 1926 to 1927, the late American poet and short-story writer Elizabeth Bishop—a Pulitzer Prize-winner and national poet laureate regarded as one of the most important poets of the 20th century—attended the North Shore Country Day School of Swampscott, where she published her first poems and stories in the school's literary magazine, The Owl. Just 10 years later, in 1936, that Swampscott institution became part of the history of the Shore we know today, when our Shore Country Day School was founded with the merger of North Shore Country Day and the Shore School of Beverly Farms.

Bishop's enrollment in North Shore's ninth grade followed a series of geographical moves, family crises, and losses that would become instrumental in defining the themes of her work. Her most famous poem, "One Art," begins:

Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, but spent much of her early childhood in Nova Scotia, on her maternal grandparents' farm. Her father, a builder, had died when she was eight months old; when she was just five years old, her mother had been declared mentally ill and institutionalized for the rest of her life. 

Not long after the move to Nova Scotia, Bishop returned to Worcester after her paternal grandparents sought and won custody of her. The arrangement was again short-lived, however: Bishop was unhappy, and she was sent to live with her aunt's family, first in Revere and later in Saugus. There, her aunt introduced her to Victorian poets such as Tennyson, Carlyle, and the Brownings, though Bishop's frequent illnesses as a child prevented her from receiving much formal education until she began attending Saugus High School as a ninth grader.

However, as only a mediocre student in such subjects as algebra and Latin, and with a disdain for school rules, Bishop was bored, unhappy, and frustrated at Saugus High. She had been admitted and planned to attend the Walnut Hill School in Natick beginning in 10th grade, but to her dismay, was first asked to repeat ninth grade at North Shore Country Day School. Her feelings about the private school are summed up with this hyperbolic quip from one of her letters: "It is a perfect Hades with modern improvements."

Such exaggeration is suspect, however: she clearly found herself enjoying writing at North Shore, where her literary gifts quickly became evident. According to Brett Millier in his Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, "The school's literary magazine, The Owl, contains no fewer than five pieces by the sixteen-year-old newcomer," including a Latin composition called "Commutatio Opinionis," the poem "The Ballad of the Subway Train," a short story about a traffic officer, and two essays on Tennyson.

From that point on, once she finally enrolled at Walnut Hill and then at Vassar College, Bishop's life broadened and her talents blossomed. She traveled widely, living in France, Key West, Washington, D.C., and Brazil. She published her first book, North & South, in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Prize for poetry. She published her second, Poems: North and South—A Cold Spring, 10 years later and won the Pulitzer Prize. She won the National Book Award in 1969 for The Complete Poems, and in 1977 her last book published during her lifetime, Geography III, won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, which no woman had won before and no other American has ever won.

After all of Bishop's international travels, and after all the global accolades she earned for her highly detailed and objective style of writing, that Bishop died in 1979 in Boston—so close to the North Shore schools and towns where she spent her formative elementary and middle school years—is perhaps a reminder of just how vitally important those early years are, and of why our Shore, descended from Bishop's Shore, devotes such care to the teaching and nurturing of young people: these years continue to resonate through every experience that comes after. 

It is also telling that, though Bishop may have called North Shore Country Day School a "perfect Hades," the opportunities she found there for improving and expanding the proficiency and ambition of her writing obviously found their place as inspiration for the rest of her life, by the end of which her published works, known for their obsession with accuracy of detail and precision of language, would become some of the most influential of the century.

Similarly, the Shore of today places writing—and communication in general—right at the heart of the curriculum, no matter the subject. Shore graduates consistently rank writing and public speaking as the areas in which they most matured during their time here, and the abilities that most transformed their experiences in secondary school and beyond.