Elizabeth Bishop in Newfoundland: "Sad and Still and Foreign" (Critical Essay‪)‬

ELIZABETH BISHOP IS CONSIDERED by many critics to be one of the most important poets of her generation. (1) In August 1932, long before she began her professional career as a writer, Bishop, along with Evelyn Huntington, a classmate from Vassar, sailed from Boston to St. John's to make a walking tour of Newfoundland, Britain's oldest overseas colony. (2) The first of many voyages to interesting and unusual places, this trip to Newfoundland was Bishop's first major journey. Though she had travelled regularly between Nova Scotia and the "Boston States" and had spent time on Cape Cod, the Newfoundland trip was the first time that Bishop, who would become famous for her sense of geography, ventured beyond her childhood world. As such, the Newfoundland trip initiated a pattern of travel to islands as far flung and as exotic as the Galapagos, Key West, and Aruba. Popular promotional literature at the time referred to Newfoundland as "America's Newest Playground" and a "Land of Picturesque Beauty and Romantic Charm." (3) Advertisements ran regularly in The Newfoundland Quarterly promoting the colony as an "unspoiled vacation-land" with a "stimulating climate" and "interesting people." (4) During her trip to the island, Bishop collected photographs of the people she met and postcards of some of the places she visited. (5) She also kept handwritten notes which at some later date she edited and typed, adding handwritten jottings in the margins. Among her papers at Vassar, this brief travel narrative is titled simply "Notes in Newfoundland, 1932." It begins 19 August (a day after she arrived on the island) and ends abruptly 3 September even though Bishop remained on the island an extra week (until 10 September). If Bishop kept notes during the final week of the trip, they have not survived. However, several photographs of people and scenes from Newfoundland and Labrador have been preserved, though it is not clear that Bishop travelled beyond the Avalon Peninsula. (6) Biographer Brett C. Miller describes the surviving journal entries this way: