QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction2

Chapter 2: Rhetorical Perspective in Elizabeth Bishop12

Chapter 3: The Anthologizing Of Elizabeth Bishop28

Chapter 4: Elizabeth Bishop and the Story of Postmodernism44

Chapter 5: Conclusion54

References59

Chapter 1: Introduction

"Questions of Travel," Bishop's third book of poems and arguably her best, appeared in 1965. It contains three sections: “Brazil,” “In the Village,” and “Elsewhere.” “In the Village” is a prose memoir of her Great Village childhood, included at the urging of Robert Lowell. The themes she introduced in "North and South" are continued in “Brazil” and “Elsewhere,” but with more subjectivity. The title poem, “Questions of Travel,” asserts that witnessing the strange is important, and that one must, to be whole, confront all the strangeness that one can.

In 1966 Bishop left Brazil temporarily for two semesters as poet-in-residence at the University of Washington. On her return to Brazil, she found Soares heavily involved in city politics and bureaucracy and near physical and psychological collapse. Trying to cope, Bishop suffered collapse herself, and both were hospitalized. Recovering, Bishop flew to New York, expecting Soares to join her there soon. She did, arriving September 19, 1967, but that evening she woke up, overdosed on tranquilizers, lingered five days in a coma, and died. Distraught, Bishop moved to San Francisco for a year, and then returned to Brazil to try to pick up the pieces of her life.

In 1969, Bishop's "Complete Poems" reached the bookstores, and in 1970 it won the National Book Award. In that year Bishop, admitting to herself that life in Brazil was no longer possible for her, accepted a teaching position at Harvard and flew back to the United States. Her final homage to her Brazilian period was a collection she translated and edited with E. Brazil: "An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry" (1972). Not long after moving to Harvard, she met Alice Methfessel, with whom she shared the rest of her life.

Elizabeth Bishop lived in Brazil more or less continuously from 1951 to 1966 and then intermittently to 1971. The country functioned as a necessary escape from the deprived and anxious world of her early childhood in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts. Yet her new life was haunted by her past. Although Brazil permitted her to think, to feel, and to experience in ways that were novel for her, that very difference impelled her to reproach the old, to release from repression some of the memories that had seemed too painful to face in North America. Moreover, Brazil represented a restoration of the comfort she had experienced only fleetingly as a child. The country therefore assumed a complex symbiotic relationship in Bishop's imagination with its climatic, cultural, and psychological opposite, the North Atlantic. In Brazil, Bishop began to construct, for virtually the first time, literary texts that evoked scenes from her Nova Scotian past. Her physical journey south initiated a parallel aesthetic journey north.

Although Bishop had alluded to Nova Scotia in a handful of texts written prior to her arrival in ...