The influence that Elizabeth Bishop's poetry has had on the poetry of John Ashbery has been widely cited. 1 Ashbery himself remarked that he "read, reread, studied and absorbed" Bishop (Shoptaw 29). In Ashbery's poem "Untilted," written only a month before Bishop's death, the speaker makes an appeal to Bishop. 2 By alluding to her early poem "The Man-Moth" and drawing on common motifs in Bishop's poetry, the speaker reveals an empathy for her unwillingness to go public with her homosexuality. Pressured by the prejudices of the 1940s and 1950s, Bishop would never write about her lesbianism, except through veiled references in her poetry that work as maps to the marginalized life of the homosexual poet. Vernon Shelty comments on Bishop's tendency to hold back: "Reticence and silence seem to have come naturally to her, but that innate bias must have been powerfully reinforced by the need for certain...