Elizabeth Bishop

This study aims at disclosing how a multitude of poetic imagery in Elizabeth Bishop's poetry is associated with the poet's sense of home and how these images reveal the different stages of the poet's attitudes towards home. This study draws upon Bishop's interviews, her biographies, critical reviews by many famous critics and some theoretical terms of childhood studies. Through a selected reading of Bishop's poems from North & South, A Cold Spring, Geography â…¢ and New Poems, the author of the thesis detected three phases in Elizabeth Bishop's attitudes towards homelessness: the phase of inward adjustment, the phase of home-seeking, and the phase of ultimate reconciliation with homelessness.In the first phase represented by North &South, Bishop conveys her sense of disorientation in New York by many surrealistic images such as the weed, the horse and the dancer, the monument, the iceberg, etc. By transferring her pains of division on these divided creatures and objects, Bishop achieves a temporary sense of control against the anxiety of collapse deriving from her childhood trauma. In A Cold Spring which marks the beginning of her second phase, Bishop tries to master her sense of disorientation first by travel and then by settlement. To her disappointment, neither travel to different places, nor settlement in Key West and Brazil can dispel her sense of being an exile. What they achieve at most is that they enable the poet to see the nature of home anew. As the poet begins to explore the roots of her disorientation in Question of Travel and Geography â…¢, she comes to realize the irretrievability of childhood home and the impossibility of replacing it with a permanent dwelling elsewhere. Reflection on her childhood trauma and adult losses, the poet finally realizes the inevitability of being an exile. Besides, these meditations also enable the poet to see how writing helps her survive the overwhelming sense of disorientation throughout her life. This "One Art" of writing is the only way the poet can make herself feel at home emotionally, if not geographically.