The Landscapes and Travels in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop

This paper aims to analyze that the central themes of landscapes and travels in Elizabeth Bishop's poetry definitely moves toward her inner self. As she couldn't be classified into the specific school of poetry such as the Beats or the Confessional poets, Bishop is clearly distinguished from her contemporary American poets.
Typically, Bishop has been recognized as one of the most critically respected female poets because of her strange and ambiguous writing style. From her early to late period, Bishop ceaselessly associates the questions of travel with“driving to the interior”of her own mind in her poetry. Having felt sense of homelessness from her childhood because of her parents' early death, Bishop has wandered lots of different places starting from her maternal grandparents' house in Nova Scotia, Canada. As she traveled lots of different places from Europe to Brazil since she came of age, her writings were fundamentally based on her own private journeys.
Most of her poems are filled with her precise observations and meditations on various landscapes and travels she experienced. It is important that the landscape Bishop describes in her poetry means a work of the mind because it is built up as much from the strata of her memory. For Bishop, the two different places, Nova Scotia and Brazil, play important roles in her search for the inner awakening.
Throughout her life, Nova Scotia and Brazil act as the geographical mirror images of each other, transcending the bounds of time and space. Consequently, her questions that“Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? / Where should we be today?”epitomize her insightful answers to the nature of travel at the same time. Bishop's insightful questions and answers of travel are revealed at the moment of awakening the daily wonders of present life.