Elizabeth Bishop’s Relationship With Nature in Poetry

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry is full of imagery that can transport the reader to any of the settings she writes about. Her ability to use these settings and the subject of nature in poetry to reflect on other themes such as travel, nurturing, death, and destruction shows her talent as a poet. When she was just a child her father died and her mother was admitted to a mental institution. The emotions caused by the absence of her parents can be seen in her poetry. When carefully explicating one of her most famous poems The Fish, the reader can see a sense of vulnerability related to the absence of a nurturing mother. Bishop channels her life experiences into her poems in a way that is relatable to every reader, filling her poetry with universal lessons and meaning for people of all backgrounds.