Geography and travel function as central metaphors in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, especially in Questions of Travel (1965) where, as the title makes obvious, she examines the impulse to roam, linking it with "childishness" and with the profound need to "dream our dreams/and have them, too." That volume reflects Bishop's experiences during a trip to Brazil that became an extended "stay" of more than a decade during which Bishop became lover and companion to Lota de Macedo Soares. The poems and letters of the period illustrate how Bishop seems to fall "naturally" into the paradigms of a journey-quest: she discovers an amazing landscape, and in the place where she is most "other" finds love and home and redeems her troubled past. But such paradigms are complicated by the poet's awareness of their conventionality and her own anxieties. In writing of Brazil, Bishop must contend with traditions of pastoral and conquest literatures that are often imperialistic. This paper explores, through selected letters and poems, the intersection of three issues: Bishop's inheritance of the tradition of traveler in the New World, her participation in and resistance to models of exploration and conquest, and her desire to find a secure haven for female love.
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