Chapter 2 - New England

Summary

Born and buried in Worcester, Massachusetts, Bishop’s peripatetic life found its physical and temperamental hub in New England. Bishop lived in Massachusetts for the greater portion of her childhood and adolescence. Though she traveled widely and lived for years in Brazil, she continued to perceive the novelty of “elsewhere” as a native “New-Englander-herring-choker-bluenoser.” This chapter examines the ways in which the New England region informed Bishop’s imagination. The Atlantic shoreline remained a lifelong fascination, a way of reckoning with time, caprice and power in poems such as ”Wading at Wellfleet” and ”The End of March.” Further inland, Bishop’s poem ”In the Waiting Room” and story ”The Country Mouse” articulate disorientation and recognition in a rich tapestry of epiphany, narrative and social critique, a mode she revisits poignantly in the poem ”Five Flights Up.” Returning to Massachusetts for a teaching post at Harvard University in 1970, Bishop stayed in New England for most of the last decade of her life.