Visits to St. Elizabeths (1950) Bedlam). For Medium Voice and Piano. Music by Ned Rorem. Text by Elizabeth Bishop. Upright folio. Three nested bifolia making 12 pages (12 pp). Plate imprint, "S. 2637." Red and orange vertical stripes lettered in white, with black-and-white drawing by Jean Cocteau. MacMahon F1. Inscribed by Bishop on the inside cover verso to her close friend and fellow poet, Frank Bidart, "For Frank Bidart / from Elizabeth Bishop" and with three ink annotations by her to the printed description below "The words of this song were written [*handwritten: " < several years"] after visit[*handwritten: "s"] by the poet to her colleague Ezra Pound in the mental institution of Saint Elizabeths where Pound was interned for many years after World War II. - Ned Rorem / Poem from The Partisan Review, 1957" and adding below "Ned Rorem inscribed the Cocteau drawing in New York (I think) after he had learned of Cocteau's death." Lightly stamped "Complimentary Copy" to upper right recto, in fine condition. TOGETHER WITH ADDITIONAL SHEET MUSIC, UNSIGNED: Conversation [Music by Ned Rorem; Poem by Elizabeth Bishop] (NY: Boosey & Hawkes, 1969), 3pp. Fine. 

A very special copy of this fabulously creepy 1950 poem about a visit to the poet Ezra Pound in an insane asylum, set to music by one of the most prolific art song composers of all time—Ned Rorem.  Part of what makes Rorem’s setting so effective, aside from the extremely manic vocal line is the demonic piano accompaniment, a seemingly endless cascade of figurations that teeter at the edge of sanity as well as playability even when played by its composer as it is in this performance featuring soprano Regina Sarfaty that was recorded very soon after the song was composed.

During her lifetime, poet Elizabeth Bishop was a respected yet somewhat obscure figure in the world of American literature. Since her death in 1979, however, her reputation has grown to the point that many critics, like Larry Rohter in the New York Times, have referred to her as "one of the most important American poets" of the 20th century. Bishop was a perfectionist who did not write prolifically, preferring instead to spend long periods of time polishing her work. Her status as one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century is based on the smallest of oeuvres. Some 70 poems were published in her lifetime in four very slim volumes. Her verse is marked by precise descriptions of the physical world and an air of poetic serenity, but her underlying themes include the struggle to find a sense of belonging, and the human experiences of grief and longing. She died in 1979, aware that her reputation was steadily increasing, eclipsing that of her close friend and fellow poet Robert Lowell. Since her death and the publication of two superb volumes of her correspondence, One Art and Words in Air(letters between her and Lowell) it has grown ever more secure. In the select pantheon of 20th-century poets writing in English, she is placed with TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Wallace Stevens and WH Auden. Her poems often took her years to write and complete, and their formal perfection and the simple, limpid accuracy of their language have always drawn the admiration of other poets. John Ashbery called her "the writer's writer's writer."

From the collection of the important American poet Frank Bidart, who received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, and the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry for his book Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016. Frank Bidart was a student and collaborator of Robert Lowell, eventually becoming a close friend and amanuensis to the elder poet, later co-editing Lowell's Collected Poems. It was through Lowell that Bidart met Elizabeth Bishop,  and "Lowell and Bishop became muses of a sort for Bidart...Lowell and Bishop were less teachers than parents of his own choosing, who encouraged him to become the artist he couldn’t be back home. 'I knew that knowing them—and the fact that, in some sense, they had needed me, an eager kid from Bakersfield obsessed with poetry and art, in their life—was the most unlikely gift.'" (Hilton Als, "Frank Bidart's Poetry of Saying the Unsaid," New Yorker magazine, September 4, 2017)