Elizabeth Bishop's work issues from a disposition not even to consider the temptation [to be great]. For a long time she seemed content with the natural piety featured in observation, looking with care at things that happened to offer themselves to her attention. But her way of looking at things showed that her real subject is the mutuality of eye and mind in a world largely but not completely given. Since "Geography III," her readers have recognized that the brick-on-brick procedure has produced a building not at all grandiose but simply grand. "Crusoe in England" and "The Moose" are poems that could not have been written if their poet had allowed herself, even for a second, to luxuriate in a feeling of grand possibility: They are large in implication, but untainted, unvulgar. It is natural to be moved by those poems, especially by the feeling that Bishop was...