Bernard Smith and imagining the Pacific : the art/poetics of 'discovery' and the art/poetics of writing about early European travellers in the South Pacific

First published in 1960 by Oxford University Press, Bernard Smith’s magisterial study European Vision and the South Pacific has gone through several editions and remains in print. It is now considered a foundational work in late twentieth-century Western anthropology, cultural history and art history (Anderson, Marshall and Yip 2016). This chapter examines the way in which the poetics of travel is doubly signed in Smith’s brilliant exegesis: first, in his account and analysis of the ‘explorer artists’ who were aboard the European boats that ventured into the South Pacific in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century – and the ‘poetics of travel’ expressed through their writings and the art works they produced – and then, by way of a concluding observation, in his own account of these voyages where his writing and conjuring of his subject is also a kind of ‘poetics of travel’.