Elizabeth Bishop is usually described as a modernist poet with a
skeptical mind. This essay contests the critical tendency to dismiss religion
as a serious concern in her poetry, by first challenging the widespread
dismissal in the United States of all religious approaches to modern
poetry and then challenging the tendency to disclaim attempts to
read Elizabeth Bishop in religious terms. The essay includes a close
reading of “The End of March” as a text which invites intertextual commentary
from a Christian perspective.
