Chapter 5 - Florida

Summary

Elizabeth Bishop loved Florida, the “state with the prettiest name.” She settled for a time in Key West, on the southernmost archipelago of the continental United States, delighting in the vivid birds and bright fishes of its tropical environment. The shifting seascape of coral islands and submerged reefs resonated with Bishop’s deep sense of contingency and flux. The Keys is a place of hybridity; of silt, shadows, and salvage. Its soft and balmy climate belies a complex and traumatic history of colonial struggle, racial violence, and loss. This chapter explores Bishop’s affective response to and relationship with place through the complex interwoven histories of racial and cultural identity of Southern Florida. It argues that the ‘Bone Key’ became a proving ground for much of the poetry that made up Bishop’s first collection, North & South (1946), shaping and animating the imagined South that forms one of the volume’s poles.