Elizabeth Bishop : The Art of Travel

Description

In Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel, Kim Fortuny argues that Bishops travel poetry reveals a political and social consciousness that, until fairly recently, has largely been seen as absent from her poetry and her life. Fortuny argues that questions of travel bring up questions of form in Bishops poems. Moreover, because Bishop knows much about both travel and form, yet is particularly well versed in the latter, Bishops poetry sheds light on the ethical and political problems of modern travel from a vantage gained by a scrupulous and hard-won artistry. Fortuny maintains that there is practical merit in paying close attention to the linguistic complexities of Bishops poems. The textures of poems concerned with foreign travelpoems such as Questions of Travel, Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance, Crusoe in England, and Santaremreveal a consciousness that is fundamentally social, in spite of the writers reputation for Modernist and ahistorical reserve. Consequently, the heart of this study is a series of close readings of these poems, in which Fortuny teases out the nuances of Bishops relationship to the world in which she lived and traveled, examining her apolitical poems through a political lens and encountering her poetic style as politically engaged itself."