Elizabeth Bishop's Brazil: An Attraction in Difference

Tom Winterbottom

doi:10.21471/jls.v5i2.383

Abstract

The correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop during her years in Brazil with fellow poet Robert Lowell shed light not only on her personal impressions and experience there but also on the broader atmosphere of Brazil in the 1950s and 60s. The abundant letters show an intimacy that Bishop was willing to explore in personal correspondence that was not readily forthcoming in her published poetry. The present essay analyzes that correspondence alongside the few poems Bishop wrote in or about Brazil to understand her pursuit of belonging and happiness that found an unlikely home—and a tragic end—in and around Rio de Janeiro for almost twenty years. Bishop’s trajectory from love to loss and happiness to tragedy intimately interacts, this essay argues, with changes in midcentury Brazil, from the national development pursued by Vargas and Kubitschek, including the building of Brasília, to the fallout from the 1964 military coup and beyond.

Highlights

The correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop during her years in Brazil with fellow poet Robert Lowell shed light on her personal impressions and experience there and on the broader atmosphere of Brazil in the 1950s and 60s
Questions of Travel (1965) was influenced by her impressions of the southern environment and one of only four slim volumes of poetry she wrote in her life
In Question of Travel’s eponymous poem, there is a sense of the power that this new world exerted over the narrator, a natural abundance influencing the physical and emotional state

Summary

Introduction

The correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop during her years in Brazil with fellow poet Robert Lowell shed light on her personal impressions and experience there and on the broader atmosphere of Brazil in the 1950s and 60s. Nature and its impact permeate Bishop’s writing, as evidenced in her poetry and in this letter, with a sense of being somewhere “wild” that is at the same time inevitably “magnificent.” The contrast is fascinating: within the jungle, an indescribable space where “that gentle expression [‘the country’] scarcely seems to fit,” she lives in that avant-garde Modernist home in a country that was, in 1952, internationally famous for its architectural Modernism.

Results

Conclusion