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“Questions of Travel” provided the title for Bishop’s third volume of poetry, and it comes from a group of works that were written in, and take as their theme, Brazil. The poem is at once a series of very precise observations and, obliquely, a meditation on movement in place that suggests movement in the imagination. The dichotomy that is thereby set up between mind and body comes perhaps from the French philosopher René Descartes and echoes earlier literary treatments of the question of travel in works by Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Marcel Proust.

In “One Art,” Bishop, who was always interested in using formal techniques, uses the villanelle to give form to her thoughts on loss. The form requires that the first and third lines of the first stanza be used alternately as third-line refrains for the succeeding stanzas until the last stanza, which contains four lines, the last two of which repeat the refrain lines. As in this poem, the line length is commonly iambic pentameter, and the rhyme scheme for each triplet is aba. As with many writers of villanelles, Bishop alters some of the repeated lines instead of repeating precisely. Throughout much of the poem, her voice is flippant about the ease with which things get lost, things ranging from keys to time. In the fourth stanza, however, as she notes that she lost her mother’s watch and a loved house, she sounds less willing to accept the loss. In the fifth, she says that losing two cities and an entire continent (probably a reference to her leaving Brazil) still was not a disaster, although such losses sound enormous to the reader. The last stanza is often taken to refer to the suicide of Bishop’s Brazilian lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, the “you” the speaker says she has lost. However, when the speaker says that this shows that the art of losing is “not too hard to master,” her understatement suggests the opposite, as the poem concludes that the loss “may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” The parenthetical “Write it!” suggests one way to cope with disastrous losses—through art.

Although “At the Fishhouses” consists largely of description, it also seems to offer a formulation of the relation between humans and nature, or humans and truth, which approaches that achieved by some of the poems of Robert Frost, in which daily occurrences are made to yield deeper meanings through a juxtaposition with larger themes. In this poem, furthermore, the precise descriptions that in many of Bishop’s works are simply a fact of style come to take on the quality of content, being put in context by the sudden shift to abstraction of the work’s final six lines.

“Visits to St. Elizabeths” is the result of Bishop’s visits, while in Washington, D.C., as the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, to see the great modernist poet Ezra Pound, who had been incarcerated in this mental hospital as an alternative to conviction for treason; he had made purportedly pro-Fascist radio broadcasts on Italian radio during World War II. Bishop’s reaction, characteristically enough, has nothing to do with politics and focuses only on the man in the hospital, who is never named. Yet the poem seems to lose a great deal if the reader is unaware of the poetic stature of Ezra Pound (for some literary historians, the single most original figure of Anglo-American modernism, and at any rate a figure without whom the shape of twentieth century literature would have been vastly different). It helps to have a sense both of Pound’s literary grandeur and stature and of the circumstances to which he had been reduced. The narrator’s meditation involves a realization of both these extremes, of both the splendors and miseries of the poem’s central figure.

“The Educational Experience” offers Barthelme’s view not only of what current education consists—random facts with no coherence—but perhaps also of the worth of the entire sum of humankind’s history: nothing. Barthelme’s theory of history is contained in a fractured quotation from Wittgenstein that is offered by the “group leader” toward the end of the story: “The world is everything that was formerly the case.” People are nothing but the bodies of their predecessors, which do not form into a coherent whole, as the chunks of citation and reference remain undigested. This past ranges from the Fisher King of the Holy Grail quest legends (whom T. S. Eliot claimed to have included in The Waste Land) to the television character Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.

“At the End of the Mechanical Age” is Barthelme’s teasing meditation on the necessity and impossibility of conceptualizing human existence in the inhuman terms of “age” or “era.” His point of departure is certainly the suggestion, first developed in the 1960’s and 1970’s, that industrial society was evolving into a state that would be fundamentally different from that which had defined it for the previous two centuries—what some commentators have called postindustrial society. Barthelme pokes fun at this notion without fundamentally overturning it, by having the two main characters, the unnamed “I” and his eventual wife, “Mrs. Davis,” speak of “the end of the mechanical age” as if it were the same thing as talking about the end of the day, a precise thing with a particular nature and schedule.