Some of the enchanted mystery which permeates Elizabeth Bishop's poetry arises from her preoccupation with dreams, sleep, and the borders between sleeping and waking. Her poems contain much of the magic, uncanniness and displacement associated with the works of the surrealists, for she too explores the workings of the unconscious and the interplay between conscious perception and dream. Although she draws very little from the surrealists' extreme experiments in technique, she does inherit the liberating bequest of their imaginative breakthroughs, and in an original and unobtrusive manner, she assimilates various surrealist aspirations into her poetic practice. (p. 63)

Although Bishop shares the surrealists' interest in the unconscious, her methods for incorporating oneiric qualities into her poetry differ fundamentally from their approach. She does not seek to subvert logical control, and she refuses to accept the "split" between the roles of conscious and unconscious forces in our perception of the...