Living Predicament And Spiritual Salvation

Elizabeth Bishop is one of the greatest poets in the twentieth century.She was American Poet Laureate from 1949-1950 and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956.Her poems are contemplative and mysterious.She is good at making language more accurate and perfect.She combines her new ideas with moral meaning,expressing a strong sense of justice and responsibility.In recent years,Bishop has gained more and more attention in international academia.Critics abroad have focused on biological,racial studies and her idea of “perfectionism”,etc.At the beginning of the 21 th century,domestic critics have paid attention to Bishop's poems on visual art,dynamic poetics,politics of spacial poetics and so on.However,there is still a long way to go in terms of the scope and depth of the research.Space theory in the 20 th century was commonly applied to physics and architecture.Since the “spacial turn” in literature began in 1970 s,there has appeared new perception about the application of space theory in literary studies.Having experienced the prosperity of literature and art,Elizabeth Bishop paid special attention to spaces in her writings.This thesis tries to conduct a space study of Elizabeth Bishop's poems from the perspective of space theory of Henry Lefebvre,Gaston Bachelard and so on.These spaces are not plain language,but dynamic signs with deep insights,recording Bishop's inner world and showing her attention and sympathy to ordinary people's living condition and state of mind.This thesis is composed of three parts.The introduction offers a brief biography and works of Bishop and presents recent research achievements concerning Bishop's poetry.The theoretical base and structure of this thesis are introduced,too.The body of this thesis consists of three chapters.Chapter one focuses on the physical space,illustrates urbanization and its influence and presents ordinary people's living condition.The development of urbanization leads to expansion of urban space.It changes people's life style but brings them into predicament.Ordinary people suffer from living crisis inphysical spaces like plant,street,balcony and so on.Chapter two explores Bishop and ordinary people's mental space.They are in extreme solitude and have a strong sense of instability.Besides,Bishop depicts the crisis of identity of those ordinary people.Chapter three emphasizes space writing.These spaces are symbols of nature,home and art,which function as spiritual salvation to help Bishop get through ups and downs in life.The conclusion makes a brief summary of the space study of Bishop's poems and reiterates the great importance of it.