Under the influence: Elizabeth Bishop’s England and Frances Leviston’s Louisiana

Elizabeth Bishop’s relationship to the literal places she lived in, travelled through and sometimes made home, has long been a key concern of critics and readers. What interests me in this article is Bishop’s relationship to a country she visited on just a few occasions, namely England. In so doing, I intend to focus not so much on Bishop’s experiences in England—she made short trips there in the 1930s, 1960s and 1970s—but rather on her idea of England as a poetic home and the extent to which contemporary poets in Britain and Ireland have been influenced by her writing. Bishop’s England is thus at least two things here, a body of literature she herself reads and reinterprets in her poetry, and, more recently, a national poetry that has itself become Bishopesque in light of her contemporary popularity.