A Journey With Elizabeth Bishop

Abstract

In my dissertation, I am going to deal with Elizabeth Bishop’s most widely discussed major metaphor and trope: travel. Certainly, as is clear from Bishop’s poetry, travel is depicted as the source from which other recurrent topics develop. Indeed, it stands at the core of her poetry and therefore, everything else depends on it and is interconnected with it. For example, themes such as childhood, trauma, loss, death, memory and nature are all related to it. This is because Bishop never had any stability in her life and due to her miserable and complicated childhood she was always uprooted. In fact, she grew up among various paternal and maternal relatives and therefore, she was constantly and involuntarily on the move. Thus, she became interested in geography and worldwide travel since her insecurities seemed to disappear when she was exploring new territories. Consequently, Bishop’s poetry has a prevailing presence of the concept of homesickness, which is not meant as missing home but rather as the missing of a place of origin. In fact, because of her painful childhood, travel is at first considered as a way to her own exile, whereas, later it changes into a simple and delightful experiencing condition, a need to discover and relate with the wild natural world in order to reach a final feeling of safety, peace and joy. Hence, my aim is to try to explain this connection among Bishop’s tropes through the analysis of some of her poems and, in order to reach my goal, I have decided to divide my argument into three main chapters.