Elizabeth Bishop’s Back-and-Forth Migration: An American Poet’s Canadian “Home-Made” Aesthetics

Abstract

Elizabeth Bishop’s compelling themes of home, travel, and geography are intricately related to her migration from North to South and back again. Starting with Bishop’s own words about her Canadianness, this study mostly examines how Great Village, Nova Scotia has forged her life and art, and in what manner her actual lived experiences in and memories of Nova Scotia are embodied in her poems. The interior landscape of “Sestina” and “First Death in Nova Scotia,” is represented through the rhetoric of memory. The exterior landscape of “At the Fishhouses” and “Cape Breton” in Nova Scotia provides detailed local geography connected with the poet’s biography. Another Nova Scotian poem, entitled simply “Poem,” dealing with what art including poetry is and what kind of value art implies, employs the poet’s memory recalled by her relative’s painting about the place. Finally, by reading her topographical poem, “Moose, this paper claims the multi-leveled significance of Bishop’s journey from Nova Scotia to Boston; a trip from country to city, between the two nations, between the inner and the outer. In Bishop’s Nova Scotian poems, the boundary between geography and biography, and between exterior and interior is blurred; and then landscapes “as real sites and as representations” are saturated with her geographical, biographical, and aesthetic values.