Some years ago now, Margaret Atwood observed that the American poet Robert Frost's famous line, "The land was ours before we were the land’s" would never have been written by a Canadian. "The land was never ours," Atwood said. "Our relationship to the land is that of creatures who have to struggle to survive." From her childhood, Atwood always had a physical relationship with her land. She spent her early years following in the footsteps of her father, an entomologist, who scoured the forests of northern Quebec and Ontario in search of specimens to study. From her experience of the wilderness, and from her early reading of fairy tales and detective novels, Atwood built the landscape of what would become the geography of her imagination. She wrote her first poems when she was not yet six years old; she did not attend school full time until the age of twelve, and then, as a teenager, she began to distinguish herself as a poet with a sharp, ironic and unmistakably personal voice.
