| Description |
Elizabeth Bishop throughout her life was a wanderer. Biographers and literary critics made much of her travels, saying she was searching for a home to replace one that was blighted in her youth by death and mental illness. This paper, however, examines her literary journey. While Bishop went out into the world, she traveled inward with her poetry. She sought a domain for the imagination, wrestled with its origins, the place of the poet in the world, the reality found in one's surroundings and that which blooms from the end of a pen. In the end, Bishop made a poetic journey from the first tentative lines of a writer uncertain about how to be in the world of the imagination, to a poet who turns freely away from the natural world and the comfortable place of home and knowledge to write her own space. This project charts the path of her poetic imagination by tracing the evolution of a poetry in five of her works: "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," "At the Fishhouses," "Brazil, January 1, 1502," "In the Waiting Room," and "The End of March." By the last of these five poems, Bishop had became a poet for whom reality was found in the unique alchemy of place, memory and knowledge as those things fused in her poems. She also realized that the poet is not all-mighty. The poetic imagination has its place - as well as its limitations. |
