Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and the New Yorker

This article reads Elizabeth Bishop's poems of the 1950s in their first publishing context, the New Yorker magazine, and in relation to their scene of production, the economic and architectural environments of mid-century Brazil. The New Yorker had an important mediating function in relation to Bishop's own role as cultural go-between, and remains a crucial interpretative context for her poetry's characteristic provisionality and self-ironies. In specifying these material aspects of the outside world in which the Brazil poems were accommodated - the buildings in which they were written and the magazine in which they were published - the article offers a new perspective on the questions of belonging that lie at the heart of Bishop's unsettled poetics, and so on the politics of her writing at mid-century.