Kim Fortuny

Elizabeth Bishop Kim Fortuny

In Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel, Kim Fortuny argues that Bishop's travel poetry reveals a political and social consciousness that, until fairly recently, has largely been seen as absent from her poetry and her life. Fortuny argues that questions of travel bring up questions of form in Bishop?s poems. Moreover, because Bishop knows much about both travel and form, yet is particularly well versed in the latter, Bishop?s poetry sheds light on the ethical and political problems of modern travel from a vantage gained by a scrupulous and hard-won artistry.

Fortuny maintains that there is practical merit in paying close attention to the linguistic complexities of Bishop's poems. The textures of poems concerned with foreign travel?poems such as "Questions of Travel," "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," "Crusoe in England," and "Santarém"?reveal a consciousness that is fundamentally social, in spite of the writer's reputation for Modernist and ahistorical reserve. Consequently, the heart of this study is a series of close readings of these poems, in which Fortuny teases out the nuances of Bishop's relationship to the world in which she lived and traveled, examining her "apolitical" poems through a political lens and encountering her poetic style as politically engaged itself.

Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel will appeal to Bishop scholars, literary scholars, and those with an interest in Modernist poetry.