Chapter 24 - Travel

Summary

Elizabeth Bishop’s travel writings sometimes comprise accounts of voyages, but, more often, both poems and essays constitute meditations on travel itself, including questions about the traveler’s ability or inability to see what is before her, and the moral question of her own implication as an American tourist, observing cultures from the outside. While criticized at times for colonialist attitudes, Bishop in fact frequently offers critiques of colonialism in the poems. Her travel prose, including her account of a trip to the Amazon with Aldous Huxley and his wife, owes its richness to its freedom to introduce anecdote and observation without any obligation to adhere to a thesis, even while some of her poems express anxiety about that very lack. Additionally, some of Bishop’s key poems involve her “writing back” to certain travel texts, e.g. Robinson Crusoe, or, in another famous case, an article in National Geographic.