“Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens: Sustaining the Eye/I,” in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, Fall, 1995, pp. 133-54.

In the following essay, Goodridge examines the influence of Wallace Stevens's poetry on the development of Bishop's sociopolitical poetic stance.

Although Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens crossed paths in Key West, they never met each other, though each knew the other's work. Bishop had a lifelong fascination with Stevens—with his poetry, his ideas about art and the role of the artist, his way of living, and the delicate balance he strived to maintain between his art and the demands of his “public” life. It would not be too much to say that he influenced her entire poetic project, though certainly this influence can most clearly be seen in her early work.¹ By her own admission, Bishop considered Stevens an important influence on her early writing. When asked in...