[Elizabeth Bishop once] told me that Poe's best poem, for her taste, was a little-known piece called "Fairy-Land." Years of re-reading that poem have brought me close to her opinion, and have led me to see that her fondness for it was based on a true affinity. "Fairy-Land" is a charming dream-vision, written in a transparent style unusual for Poe; at the same time, its weeping trees and multitudinous moons are repeatedly and humorously challenged by the voice of common sense; out of which conflict the poem somehow modulates, at the close, into a poignant yearning for transcendence. All of the voices of that poem have their counterparts in Elizabeth's own work.

Reticent as she was, Elizabeth Bishop wrote several autobiographical pieces in which she testified to a lifelong sense of dislocation. That is, she missed from the beginning what some enjoy, an unthinking conviction that things ought...