SOURCE: Doreski, Carole Kiler. “‘Back to Boston’: Elizabeth Bishop's Journeys from the Maritimes.” Colby Library Quarterly 24, no. 3 (September 1988): 151-61.

In the following essay, Doreski discusses the influence of Bishop's Canadian ancestry and upraising on her poetry.

To situate her biographer correctly in her life, Elizabeth Bishop wrote Anne Stevenson a long and detailed account of her lineage and residencies throughout her life of perpetual guesthood:

I am 3/4ths Canadian, and one 4th New Englander—I had ancestors on both sides in the Revolutionary War.

(EB to AS, 18 March 1963)

Indeed, though born in Worcester, Massachusetts, poet Bishop deserves at least the honorary status of Canadian writer. From her first to final collections, the Canada of the Maritime Provinces provides the landscape to her poems of childhood and self-discovery. She tells us in “Primer Class” that “[her] father was dead and [her] mother was away in a sanatorium” and so...