The Shattered Identity in Elizabeth Bishop's Questions of Travel

Abstract

This study aims at shedding light on the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop ( - ) who is considered as one of the most prominent American poets of the twentieth century. Elizabeth Bishop's poetry is characterized by themes of home, distance, self and other dichotomy and, of course, travel. The concept of travel covers a wide range of poems in her early and later poetry collections. For this reason, many critics look at her as a tourist more than a poet and it is not strange to consider that Bishop herself creates her suffering when preferring travelling on staying in one place or country and establishing an identity for her own, especially, when being able to return back easily. My study, however, concentrates on this idea of identity that Bishop adopts and tries to answer certain doubts about her view-point of travel and living abroad. This paper is divided into two sections; the first section is an introduction which is by itself divided into two sub-sections. The first concerns Bishop's life and career and the second is about her being as a poet. Moreover, the second section addresses directly Bishop's "Shattered" identity throughout offering three poems from her poetry collection Questions of Travel, which are "Arrival at Santos