The overarching aim of Professor Sweeney’s project “Mapping Worcester in Poetry” is to identify, document, and mark sites in Worcester that are either associated with a major Worcester-poet (Stanley Kunitz, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, Ethridge Knight, Mary Fell, and Chris Gilbert) or mentioned in their poetry. The poet Elizabeth Bishop extensively writes about her understanding of home throughout her work. Although Bishop was born in Worcester in 1911, she moved to Great Village, Nova Scotia when she was eight months old following the death of her father. At the age of six, Bishop moved back to Worcester to live with her paternal grandparents after her mother was committed to a sanatorium. However, Bishop was unhappy living in Worcester, and often depicts the house she lived in there as “gloomy” and “dismal” since she was being reminded of her father’s death (Prose, 89, 98). Throughout her adult life, Bishop traveled extensively across Europe and spent fifteen years living in Brazil with her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares. Bishop’s poetry continually reflects her experiences living in various places in Canada, the United States, and abroad. In three poems— “Sestina,” “Crusoe in England,” and “Questions of Travel”—she expresses a child’s understanding of a house, a fictitious character’s relationship to an imaginary island, and the ethics of traveling. Even though these poems were written in the middle and end of Bishop’s career, they incorporate aspects of her entire life, spanning from her childhood to when she lived in Brazil. While these poems elaborate on various themes related to residing or traveling somewhere, they also connect the physical structure of a house with the concept of home.

Poster Presentation