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 furniture of personality and biography—the facts, the manuscripts, the ups and downs of public reputation…. In the perspective of loss, and actual feeling, artifacts and art can seem withered remnants. In their modesty of outward manner, and their immensely proud awareness of their own power, Bishop's poems always show us, and never tell us, that they are the exception: in her poems, isolation is suspended, as the artifact rises from the dust to unfold its living soul.

She could afford her indifference toward celebrity, and her cool amusement at the literary museum of biography and criticism, because her work was unequaled in its particular intensity. Rereading Bishop's Complete Poems, and the more recent Geography III (1976), I find the emotional force and penetration of her work amazing. In a way, she had to write Geography III, and especially its first two poems ("In the Waiting Room" and "Crusoe in England") in order to teach us readers the full extent to which her poems were not merely what critics and fellow-poets had always called them—"perfect," "crafted," "readable," "exquisite"—but profoundly ambitious as well.

The critical cliché for years was to praise Bishop for her "eye"—a convention she mischievously, perhaps a bit contemptuously, abetted by remarking that her poems were "just description." The purpose of the "eye" and of the description (as "In the Waiting Room" makes explicit) is for Bishop an act of fierce self-definition: she saw the world with such preternatural clarity in order to distinguish herself from it…. She wrote so well about people and places because she had a powerful motive, embattled; that motive, in nearly all the poems, is to define oneself away from two opposing nightmares: the pain of isolation, and the loss of identity in the mass of the visible world.

In other words, "description" in Bishop is not the notation of pretty or quaint details, but the surest form of knowledge; and knowledge is the geography of survival. Her poems are "just description"—in the same sense that the ocean at the conclusion of her great poem "At the Fishhouses" is just the ocean….

     It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
     dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
     drawn from the cold hard mouth
     of the world, derived from rocky breasts
     forever, flowing and drawn, and since
     our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

The grandeur of this vision of knowledge, and the tragic sense of knowledge's limitations, are folded up carefully into the strict discipline of description like the ribs of Crusoe's umbrella. I'll stop for a moment over just one detail: the wit—the sublime wit, though it sounds too fancy to say so—of "flowing, and flown" at the end. In a lesser writer, the brilliant stroke that makes two distinct verbs seem like two forms of one verb would be a notable ornament; but in Bishop's line, the wit is made to bear up triumphantly under the pressure of a large intellectual construct—the way wit operates in Shakespeare. It is this kind of thing that led John Ashbery to call Bishop "a writer's writer's writer."

The obituaries for Elizabeth Bishop were not loud or hyperbolic; they were immensely respectful, and perhaps slightly uncomprehending, just like the "local museum" that she drily invented to accept for vague public use the loner Crusoe's chattels. The year 1979 may be remembered for her loss, long after many of the clowns, heroes, and villains of our headlines fade from memory. (pp. 32-3)