Mapping Elizabeth Bishop’s “Brazil, January 1, 1502”

Scholars have yet to address the full complexities of poetic mode (epic, ekphrasis) and plurality of voice that constitute Elizabeth Bishop’s “Brazil, January 1, 1502.” To attend more fully to these complexities, this essay examines such precursors of the poem as the Cantino planisphere of 1502 and Sir Kenneth Clark’s Landscape into Art. In doing so, this essay demonstrates that Bishop’s poem exposes a deliberate projection of an imperialistic worldview onto a landscape—here, Brazil—and by extension onto “new world” peoples radically violated by this imposition.