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Among the major contributions of the new Library of America edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s Poems, Prose, and Letters are not only more poems, a handful of which are finished or nearly so, but a great deal of Bishop’s exceptional prose, most of which was published only in magazines and literary journals throughout her career, such as her wonderful essays written at Vassar in the 1930s. But some of the best pieces were not published at all. Among these is an account of a trip she took to Brasília, the new capital of Brazil, and the surrounding indigenous people. She traveled with Aldous Huxley and his wife, as well as others, in 1958. The essay is obviously finished and polished, and Bishop sent it to the New Yorker. The magazine rejected it, apparently because Huxley did not say enough in it (Fountain and Brazeau 163). The trip most certainly inspired one of Bishop’s great poems, “Brazil, January 1, 1502.” And the essay can be seen as a kind of companion piece to that poem,revealing—alongwithothernewlypublishedmaterialinAliceQuinn’s Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, the Library of America edition, and the complete Lowell and Bishop correspondence—Bishop’s increasingly involved dialogue with Brazilian politics. We can now see that her exposure to the epicenter of this discussion, through her long relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares, a member of Rio’s intellectual and cultural elite, and her immersion in Brazilian cultural and political life, allowed her to make important links to social, cultural, and political issues that had concerned her since college. The story of Bishop’s Brazilian politics emerges from these new editions in recently published poems, such as “Suicide of a Moderate Dictator,” and reveals itself most strikingly in the Brasília essay and another poem of this period “Brasil, 1959.”1 Words in Air, the complete correspondence betweenBishopandLowell,inturn,showsusaBishopstrugglingwithhowtofind a suitable “form” of protest that could address the gathering revolutionary crisis in Brazil that eventually led to the fall of democracy in that country. I take up several Bishop’s Brazilian Politics Bethany Hicok BETHANY HICOK 134 key moments in Bishop’s evolving poetics of this period—the fall of the Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas in 1954 that inspired Bishop to make several attempts to write a more overtly “political” poetry; the trip she took to Brasília with Huxley; and, finally, the deepening revolutionary crisis in Brazil between 1961 and 1964 out of which emerged one of Bishop’s great but neglected ballads, “The Burglar of Babylon.” This newly published material allows us to establish an important link between Brazilian politics, social policy, poverty, race, and gender—issues that Bishop was able to finally bring together in some of the most powerful poetry emerging from her Brazilian years. The story of how Bishop ended up in Brazil is well known. In November 1951, Elizabeth Bishop boarded the SS Bowplate in New York harbor for the beginning of a planned trip around the world. Her first stop was Rio de Janeiro to visit Pearl Kazin and Kazin’s new husband, Victor Kraft, who were staying with a friend, Mary Morse, and Lota de Macedo Soares (Millier 235). While there, Bishop ate the fruit of the cashew plant, became violently ill, and Macedo Soares nursed her back to health, then invited her to stay, and Bishop did—for nearly two decades. We know that much of this time (at least the first decade) was a relatively happy and productive period for Bishop, and within the safety, distance, and love created in Brazil with the life she made with Macedo Soares, she was able to return to the traumatic events of her childhood and come to terms in powerful poetry with the loss and suffering she had experienced. This story of childhood loss and new love found is a familiar one to Bishop’s readers. But there is another story about Bishop’s years in Brazil with Macedo Soares, a story that has not yet been told, a tale of Brazilian politics that can be more clearly seen through the newly published poetry and prose of the new editions. To begin with a brief outline: Macedo Soares was not only a Brazilian aristocrat, but a self-taught architect with political ambitions who came from a prominent political and journalistic family in Rio de Janeiro (Fountain and Brazeau 129–33). She was a close friend of Carlos Lacerda, a well-known journalist and political agitator who founded...

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