Elizabeth Bishop wrote with an awareness of developments in the visual arts at the beginning of the twentieth century, often seen as spearheading the Modernist movement in all the arts. As well as being a profoundly visual poet and sharing an interest in detailed description with her mentor Marianne Moore, Bishop also questioned the idea of a settled point of view and embraced both uncertainty and multiplicity in relation to seeing. Temperamentally she found an affinity with the idea of the Baroque in seventeenth-century writing and in the parallels with twentieth-century art drawn in art theory. Her early attraction to Surrealism also had to do with the disorientating effects of seeing and the uncertain boundary between inner and outer worlds. A writer who also painted herself, though in a small way, Bishop was always alert to issues of spatial representation, and how art and writing traced a similar process of their own emergence.