The Geographical Writing In Elizabeth Bishop's Poetry

Elizabeth Bishop is one of the most important and influential female poets in America in the 20^th century.Various geographical factors and geographical images are the most distinctive parts of her poems.Most of her poems can be regarded as“descriptions of the earth's surface”.“Geography?”presents her overall conception of geographical writing.Four types of poems,namely,natural poems,travel poems,nostalgic poems and ekphrastic poems,carry her thoughts on different geographical issues.Through the investigation of these four types of poems,this paper discusses how Bishop imagines,describes and constructs the geographical world in poems,and how geographical factors and geographical images present her thinking on the relationship between self and the era,society,the Other and arts.Ocean and land are Bishop's most concerned natural geographical space,which presents an integrated and open geographical structure in her poems.Bishop uses this structure to imagine and explore the relationship between herself and the outside world.On the one hand,Bishop imaginatively places“self”on land.The discovery of the connection between land and sea by the observer in the poems often symbolizes the dissolution of the binary opposition between self and objective material world.On the other hand,the overall form of land and sea space is a metaphor for the social situation.This space is messy in the general pattern and clear in details.Geographical observer who is involved in it tries to find and witness“an intelligible unity”in some details and reconstructs the general spiritual order.North and South are two directional metaphors in Bishop's personal experience and poetry creation.“North”refers to her hometown of Nova Scotia in Canada when she was a child.“South”refers to Brazil,the most important place in her travel poems.Bishop's travel poems and nostalgic poems contain reflections and corrections on the“travel-nostalgia”mode in western traditional travel literature.In the travel poems with“Brazil”as the theme,Bishop reflects on the egocentric perspective and Imperialist tendency and tries to think about the relationship between self and the Other with“double perspective”.In her nostalgic poems,the protagonists are often the incarnations of Bishop in childhood.They“witness”some strangeness in the house by staring at the household objects and furnishings that they are accustomed to.The illusion of“home”is broken by this strangeness.This paper holds that Bishop,through the writing of these two types of poems,attributes herself to a larger geographical scope that beyond home and foreign land.Therefore,the relationship between home and foreign land in her poetry map is not the center and edge,but here and there,north and south.In modern western literary theories,“ekphrasis”refers to the description,imitation or transformation of visual arts by languages and words,and it is regarded as a specific genre.Ekphrastic poems refer specifically to poems created by the art of ekphrasis.After World War II,the institutionalized of American art led to the selection and evaluation criteria of works of art being mastered by institutions.Art was separated from the soil where it occurred.Under this background,Bishop created many personalized ekphrastic poems with maps and landscape paintings as the“pre-text”.Through the description and interpretation of pictures in poems,she expresses her unique poetic and artistic views.In“Map”,she observes and describes maps with aesthetic eyes,and compares poets to map makers,emphasizing the close connection between art and the world.In the ekphrastic poems that take landscape painting as the“pre-text”,Bishop shows the way and process of artistic recipients“inventing scenery”.In her view,the value of art can only be constructed and preserved in the eyes of individuals.