18 pages • 36 minutes read
Elizabeth BishopThe Armadillo
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1957A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Skunk Hour” by Robert Lowell (1956)
While Bishop wrote her poem about travels in Brazil, she dedicated it to her friend Robert Lowell. In response to “The Armadillo,” he wrote about a skunk in a trash can. Lowell’s poem also explores The Interactions Between Humans and Nature.
“The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop (1946)
“The Fish” is the most famous poem by Bishop. Like “The Armadillo,” “The Fish” focuses on an animal. The interaction between humans and nature in this poem is catching the fish. In this poem, the speaker provides more details on the fish’s body than is given about the distant armadillo, but similarly takes the fish outside of its natural environment. Both the armadillo and the fish are displaced.
“Pigeons” by Marianne Moore (1935)
Moore and Bishop met at Vassar and became lifelong friends. “Pigeons” can be compared to “The Armadillo” in that it also focuses on the animal world. However, Moore’s poem looks at pigeons in different historical contexts, where Bishop’s poem focuses on a single month in Brazil.
Further Literary Resources
“Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker” by The University of Chicago (2011)
This installment of The University of Chicago’s Poem Present Lecture Series offers context about the publication where “The Armadillo” originally appeared—The New Yorker. The introduction is by Stephen Young, from the Poetry Foundation, and the curated letter exchanges between Elizabeth Bishop and the editors of The New Yorker magazine are read by Linda Kimbrough, Suzanne Petri, and others.
Latin American Travelogues Digital Collection by Brown University
This website, created by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown, offers digital scans of travel writing that provide context for Bishop as a travel writer. A section of the website is dedicated to travels through Brazil, which is where Bishop was inspired to write “The Armadillo.”
Magical Sites: Women Travelers in 19th Century Latin America edited by Marjorie Agosin and Julie H. Levison (1999)
This book offers context about travel writing, specifically by women traveling in Brazil, like Bishop. These travelogues were written about a century before Bishop’s poem, laying the groundwork for “The Armadillo” and other poems in Questions of Travel.
Listen to Poem
This is a recorded live reading of the poem by Sarah Sadie Busse, the Poet Laureate of Madison, Wisconsin.
Related Titles
By Elizabeth Bishop
