SOURCE: Oktenberg, Adrian. “The Letter and the Spirit.” Women's Review of Books 11, nos. 10-11 (July 1994): 27–29.

In the following essay, Oktenberg argues that the publication of Bishop's letters will lead to her poetry being taken more seriously.

Elizabeth Bishop is now recognized as one of the major American poets of this century, and the publication of this first selection of her letters will remain a lasting gift to literature. It will also accelerate a change, which has been building for some time, in the way Bishop is read. During her lifetime, Bishop was seen as a writer of marginalia, as an acolyte of Marianne Moore's school of meticulous observation of the strangeness of things, as a painter of delicate watercolors (“The Map”) and what Oscar Williams called “charming little stained-glass bits.” Bishop's modesty, reticence and New England or Nova Scotian rectitude were advertised as models of a presumably “feminine...