Abstract Throughout her career, Elizabeth Bishop uses seabirds to create a model of the poet as someone who asks open-ended, sometimes unanswerable questions. Bishop’s use of avian speakers prefigures the ecocritical admonition by theorists like SueEllen Campbell and Mark Payne to remember our own position as human observers situated within an interconnected network of natural and cultural objects and processes. Across more than thirty years of poems, Bishop’s bird-speakers’ cautious perspective-taking suggests that we may—in a limited way—bridge the gap between sometimes alien subjectivities, potentially mitigating but not ending the individual’s loneliness.
Rachel Trousdale (Sat,) studied this question.