Quote by Elizabeth Bishop: “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?”

This line questions the nature of travel and experience. It asks whether true understanding comes from direct encounter or from imaginative contemplation, pondering if the imagined version of a place is more profound than the real one.

This question opens Bishop's poem 'Questions of Travel,' written during her long residency in Brazil. It reflects her complex feelings about being an expatriate and the constant introspection about one's place in the world.

American poet known for her precise, restrained verse and her long residency in Brazil. Her collection Geography III, which contains One Art, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976; she was the first American to win the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.