“The Elizabeth Bishop Phenomenon,” in New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, Vol. 26, No. 4, Fall, 1995, pp. 903-30. In the following essay, Travisano examines the sudden rise in the critical opinion of Bishop as one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.

In the following essay, Travisano examines the sudden rise in the critical opinion of Bishop as one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century.

“The Closet of Breath: Elizabeth Bishop, Her Body and Her Art,” in Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal, Vol. 38, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 152-75. In the following essay, Lombardi examines the effect of Bishop's numerous illnesses on her poetry.

“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.

In the following essay, Palattella analyzes the political elements of North & South.

“I Am (Not) This: Erotic Discourse in Bishop, Olds, and Stevens,” in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, Fall, 1995, pp. 234-54. In the following essay, Ostriker discusses similarities and differences in the erotic imagery of Bishop, Sharon Olds, and Wallace Stevens.

“From Gender to Genre and Back: Elizabeth Bishop and ‘The Moose,’” in American Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, Summer, 1994. In the following essay, Blasing explores Bishop's complicated position on feminism and her place among women poets.

“Elizabeth Bishop's Social Conscience,” in English Literary History, Vol. 62, No. 2, Summer, 1995, pp. 467-86. In the following essay, Longenbach explores Bishop's interest in social issues, particularly women's rights and feminism.

In the following essay, Longenbach explores Bishop's interest in social issues, particularly women's rights and feminism.

“Erasing the Maternal: Rereading Elizabeth Bishop,” in The Iowa Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, Spring/Summer, 1992, pp. 82-103. In the following essay, Wallace examines the maternal presence in Bishop's poetry.

“Elizabeth Bishop: Perversity as Voice,” in American Poetry, Vol. 7, No. 2, Winter, 1990, pp. 31-49. In the following essay, Brogan discusses Bishop's innovative use of poetic voice.

In the following essay, Dickie examines Bishop's choice of poetic form in relation to her subject matter.

In the following essay, Brogan explores Adrienne Rich's contention that Bishop's lyric voice “explores issues of outsiderhood and difference.”

In the following essay, Edelman discusses the possibility of presenting a literal reading of “In the Waiting Room.”

In the following essay, Xiaojing argues that “Rainy Season; SubTropics” contains essential clues to Bishop's poetics.

“The Unbearable Lightness of Elizabeth Bishop,” in Southwest Review, Vol. 79, No. 1, Winter, 1994, pp. 120-38. In the following essay, Logan discusses the ways in which Bishop's poetry has been misinterpreted and pigeonholed by critics.

“An Un-Romantic American,” in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1988, pp. 73-92. In the following essay, Boland argues that Bishop is “the one un-Romantic American poet of her generation.”

“‘Time to Plant Tears’: Elizabeth Bishop's Seminary of Tears,” in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 60, No. 4, November, 1995, pp. 69-87. In the following essay, Powers-Beck discusses the influence of the poetry of George Herbert on Bishop's work.

“The Iceberg and the Ship,” in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXV, No. 4, Fall, 1996, pp. 704-19. In the following essay, Stevenson discusses the development of Bishop's poetry, her major influences, and personal experiences that affected her work.

“Elizabeth Bishop and Revision: A Spiritual Act,” in American Poetry Review, Vol. 25, No. 2, March-April, 1996, pp. 43-50. In the following essay, Mann examines early drafts of Bishop's poetry to understand her thoughts on revision.

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 Subtraction of Emotion in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop,” in The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 48-61. In the following essay, Lensing discusses Bishop's refusal in her poetry to see herself as a victim or to express too much emotion.

“Elizabeth Bishop and Postmodernism,” in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, Fall, 1995, pp. 166-79. In the following essay, Page examines Bishop's place in the era of literature spanning from modernism to postmodernism.

In the following essay, Vendler discusses Bishop's major metaphors, as well as influences on her poetry.

“Shards of Childhood Memory,” in Pembroke Magazine, No. 22, 1990, pp. 68-76. In the following essay, Henning discusses Bishop's techniques of exploring aspects of her childhood in her poetry.

In the following essay, Shetley examines One Art: Letters against the surge of interest in Bishop's life and work.

[The essay from which this excerpt is taken was written in 1977.] In Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, geography is not for adventurers looking out from a center at the horizon, not for imperialists seeking to appropriate that horizon. Rather, it is the recourse of those hoping to discover, out of the flux of images, where they are and how to get home again. Bishop's poetry accepts our uncertain relation to other times, places, and things, suggesting we have no "self" otherwise, and no ...

In the following essay, Doreski discusses the influence of Bishop's Canadian ancestry and upraising on her poetry.

In the following essay, Spires reviews One Art: Letters, finding the volume a “magnificent” addition to Bishop's canon.

In the following essay, Sanger discusses the impact of linguistic patterns in Great Village, Nova Scotia on Bishop's poetry.

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

[From] the very start, there was something about [Elizabeth Bishop's] work for which elegantly standard literary analysis was not prepared. Readers have been puzzled, as when [Stephen Stepanchev] writes about "Florida": "the poet's exuberance provides a scattering of images whose relevance to the total structure is open to question. It is as though Miss Bishop stopped along the road home to examine every buttercup and asphodel she saw." [See CLC, Vol. 4.] First of a...

“Elizabeth Bishop: The Things I'd Like to Write,” in The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 62-70. In the following essay, Spires recollects her experience in studying Bishop's poetry and discusses Bishop's own feelings about her work.

When [Elizabeth Bishop] accepted the Neustadt International Prize for Literature at the University of Oklahoma in the spring of 1976, she spoke about how all her life she had "lived and behaved very much like … [a] sandpiper—just running along the edges of different countries and continents, 'looking for something.'" Which is not unlike what her poetry is doing, what indeed it has to be doing, since there is no controlling myth to chart and guide its motions: it is ...

In the following essay, Carlson-Bradley asserts that Robert Lowell's poem “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” served as an inspiration for Bishop's “First Death in Nova Scotia.”

“RSVP,” in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXIV, No. 10, June 9, 1977, pp. 29-30. In the following essay, Wood reviews Geography III, calling Bishop “a nearly impeccable poet.”

In the following essay, Irimia examines the connection between the works of Bishop and W. H. Auden.

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 ...

Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art,"… [a masterly villanelle], is a convincingly drastic approach to the archaic French form. It shows what drabness may do for an all-too-golden repetitive form. It is superior to the maudlin manias of Thomas, finer than the cerebrations of Empson and still severe, and takes its place along with those of Auden, James Schuyler, and a few other premonitory practitioners' specimen stanzas. The title is "One Art," and it identifies for u...

It is with the location, both factual and spiritual, of places that [Elizabeth Bishop's] poems often begin. It is with journeys, real and imaginary, to these places that they develop. Her definition and consideration of herself as a rational being, and her reaction as a sensitive instrument to her surroundings, to her place in the world and in the universe, have been, and continue to be, the central concerns of her poetry. Geography III refers, I take it, to elementary geography at a grade-school lev...

In the following essay, Mitrano explores Bishop's reticence using animal allegory in “Pink Dog.”

“Bishop's ‘The Colder the Air,’” in The Explicator, Vol. 46, No. 4, Summer, 1988, pp. 35-37. In the following essay, Avery examines the significance of the image of the thermometer in “The Colder the Air.”

“Bishop's ‘At the Fishhouses,’” in The Explicator, Vol. 53, No. 2, Winter, 1995, pp. 114-17. In the following essay, Graham examines the significance of Bishop's line of iambic pentameter in “At the Fishhouses.”

The eerie clarity and brilliant surfaces of Elizabeth Bishop's work have always been easy to see. Her first book, North and South (1946), contained poems that have been widely memorized, imitated, turned to as antidotes for slackness, and anthologized: "Wading at Wellfleet," "The Man-Moth," "The Monument," "Florida," "Roosters," and "The Fish" are among these early poems—not bad for a first book. But though the...

[In The Collected Prose] one will find Elizabeth Bishop's mastery of a moderate tone, find it even in the most searing fictions based upon painful recollections of her early life. One will note the characteristic curiosity, in her case often a curiosity about the curious, and it will be muted, as in her poems, by a respect and tolerance for what the curiosity discovers. There is also, here and there, the unusual visual sharpness that prompts her to challenge, as in a duel, the expected adjectives of ...

Elizabeth Bishop's steadily widening audience and her endurance among the readers she has once claimed are the reward of constancy to an ideal object. Her reputation is founded on perhaps 25 poems, among them "Love Lies Sleeping," "The Unbeliever," "The Shampoo," "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," "Arrival at Santos" and "First Death in Nova Scotia." Altogether that looks like a modest achievement ...

I have been fascinated by the diversity of challenges that The Complete Poems, 1927–1979 raises, the questions—poetic and political—that it stirs up, the opportunities it affords. In addition to the four volumes published in her lifetime, this edition … includes late poems which appeared in magazines after Geography III (1976), some posthumously published late poems, eleven poems written between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two, some uncollected later poems, and translations. P...

[The] Brazil in which Bishop so recently lived is already of another era. The early days which the poet spent in the emperor's old summer resort, Petropolis, represented a kind of latter-day Golden Age of Brazilian letters. Bishop was personally acquainted with a good number of the nation's most famous writers, many of whom had been active in the extremely important Modern Art Week of 1922, which sought to make Brazilian literature, painting and music more true to contemporary realities as wel...

With its calmly circumscribed being and elegant finish, deploying space in formally perfect patterns, each small portfolio of [Elizabeth Bishop's] work resembled classical architecture. Living in Brazil most of the time, Bishop was unaffected by the shifts in fashion, the catholicity of taste and often bitter factionalism that have marked American poetry since the end of World War II … yet she has appealed to poets as radically different as Frank O'Hara, Robert Lowell, Octavio Paz and J...

[Elizabeth Bishop once] told me that Poe's best poem, for her taste, was a little-known piece called "Fairy-Land." Years of re-reading that poem have brought me close to her opinion, and have led me to see that her fondness for it was based on a true affinity. "Fairy-Land" is a charming dream-vision, written in a transparent style unusual for Poe; at the same time, its weeping trees and multitudinous moons are repeatedly and humorously challenged by the voice of common sen...

The poetry of Elizabeth Bishop sustains seemingly contradictory commentary: she is an autobiographical poet with an impersonal touch; a surrealist given to meticulous observations of natural facts; a formalist whose poems are open-ended accumulations of detail. Bishop's work resists analysis in terms of such romantic and modernist oppositions as art and life, subject and object, dream and reality, experiment and convention. While she revises the dualistic thinking of her predecessors, her strategy re...

I have been thinking about the paradox of poetry's ability to show itself forth even while its maker seeks to remain hidden in it, because a book titled The Complete Poems: 1927–1979, by Elizabeth Bishop, has just been published…. [Elizabeth Bishop] was praised to the skies by Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell, two poets who were quite tough, very acute readers. Lowell said: "I don't think anyone alive has a better eye than she has: The eye that sees things and the mind be...

If Molière is right, and everything that isn't verse is prose, and everything that isn't prose is verse, then, with The Collected Prose of Elizabeth Bishop (companion-volume to The Complete Poems, out last year, from the same publisher), we shall have seen all we shall ever get to see of this wonderful author's work…. If the excellence of the Prose is quite unsurprising, then it should only be observed that it is not a separate excellence from that of the poems. The virtue...

In the following essay, Earnshaw praises One Art: Letters.

“Bishop's Casabianca,” in The Explicator, Vol. 52, No. 2, Winter, 1994, pp. 109-111. In the following essay, Xiaojing examines “Casabianca” as a revision of other texts.

In Elizabeth Bishop's bizarre, sly, deceptively plainspoken late poem "Crusoe In England," the famous solitary looks back on his life near its end, recalling his isolation and rescue in ways deeper and more unsettling than Defoe could have dreamed…. Bishop's Crusoe muses on the driedout, wan relics of a life. It's tempting, after Elizabeth Bishop's sudden death a few weeks ago, to understand that passage as a master-artist's commentary on the mere furn...

[Elizabeth Bishop's] poetry as a whole is sensitive in its rhythm, which is always integrated with other aspects of forms and theme; but in the four poems which make up "Songs for a Colored Singer" the musical element is especially strong. In fact, when asked if she had composed the poems to tunes, Bishop replied: I was hoping somebody would compose tunes for them. I think I had Billie Holiday in mind. I put in a couple of big words just because she sang big words well ...

Reading [Bishop's] The Complete Poems, where scarcely a poem is without its sea and travel image—coast, harbor, map, road—one is not long deceived by the maps and travel books, the fish and seabirds. This poet's role is not Haklyut nor Audubon, but Magellan, Henry the Navigator, the spirit of Clark accepting Lewis's invitation: "This is an amence undertaking fraited with numerous difficulties" and characterized by an irresistible enthusiasm not for lands untr...

The body of [Elizabeth Bishop's] work is relatively small, yet one cannot read a single line either of her poetry or prose without feeling that a real poet is speaking, one whose sense of life is as delicately and finely strung as a Stradivarius, whose eye is both an inner and an outer eye. The outer eye sees with marvelous objective precision, the vision is translated into quite simple language, and this language with the illuminated sharpness of an object under a microscope works an optical magic, ...

[The essay from which this excerpt is taken originally appeared in The New Republic, November 10, 1979.] In Elizabeth Bishop's bizarre, sly, deceptively plainspoken late poem "Crusoe in England," the famous solitary looks back on his life near its end, recalling his isolation and rescue in ways deeper and more unsettling than Defoe could have dreamed. After painting the hallucinatory, vivid island, with hissing volcanoes and hissing giant turtles—an unforgettable terrain—B...

In Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop teaches us once again that cartography can, in the right hands, be an exact science. Asking again her inveterate traveler's questions—What is in the East? In the West? In the South? In the North?—she answers them with the same miraculous (though seemingly offhand) clarity, the same order in apparent disorder, the same alchemy which changes, without our noticing, the exterior into the interior landscape. Bishop seems more preoccupied, as she travels tha...

Obligingly, the titles of Elizabeth Bishop's volumes of poetry [included in The Complete Poems, 1927–1979]—North and South, Questions of Travel, Geography III—chart the range and nature of her literary world. Geography engrosses her. Fascinated by the foreign, she maps it in poem after poem…. Even when attempting other subjects, Elizabeth Bishop finds it hard to tear herself entirely away from her attachment to the geographical. A poem about queasy thoughts in a dentist&#x...

Robert Giroux, the editor, mentions in his introduction [to The Collected Prose] a remark Bishop once made to him on the subject of the confessional poets: 'You just wish they'd keep some of those things to themselves.' He cites the example of that seemingly cheery villanelle 'One Art' ('The art of losing isn't hard to master'), written towards the end of her life, to demonstrate her freedom from self-pity. It is one of the ironies of her often fiercel...

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 ha...