SOURCE: Scott, Nathan A., Jr. “Elizabeth Bishop: Poet without Myth.” Virginia Quarterly Review 60, no. 2 (spring 1984): 255-75.

In the following essay, Scott discusses Bishop as a poet who deals exclusively with the material world without a systematic metaphysical or philosophical worldview.

The English critic John Bayley is, I believe, quite wrong when in his book, The Characters of Love, he says of Conrad: “He has no myth with a view to insight: he has scenes and he has people.” But no more apt a formula could be devised for such a poet as Elizabeth Bishop: she is, indeed, a poet without myth, without metaphysic, without commitment to any systematic vision of the world, perhaps the most thoroughly secular poet of her generation—and it makes an impressive attestation to her extraordinary record of successes in her dealings simply with the world of eye and ear that, even so, she...