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 until one considers that most of the larger poetic reputations of the past century have been founded on similar evidence. The difference is that Bishop's masterpieces stand in a higher ratio to her work as a whole. She published little, because she would not release a poem that fell short of a complete conception; and what strikes one most in reading her poems again [in "The Complete Poems: 1927–1979"] is the way they answer each other across pages or volumes, so that each plays its part: "The Bight," for example, earning our esteem for the sake of its much fuller picture of the dream house sketched in "The End of March"; the figure of streets coupled to stars, a mystery in "Going to the Bakery," somehow clarifying a similar figure in "Love Lies Sleeping."…

[Marianne] Moore's influence on Bishop was real though narrow, like the influence of Edward Arlington Robinson on Robert Frost. An original-minded author can profit incalculably from this sort of dependence; the respect one feels for the master of an earlier generation who has shown an unshakable interest in one's own fate. The result in Bishop's case was more than elective affinity and less than discipleship. Of the poems in "North & South," only "Casabianca" is a simple imitation; "The Man-Moth" presumes an audience trained by Moore; "Wading at Wellfleet" uses her discipline with traces of her diction, but the sustained metaphor of the sea as chariot gives the closing lines a power that belongs uniquely to Bishop's fable…. So too with a later poem like "Visits to St. Elizabeths."…

Throughout her career Bishop aimed to bring morality and invention together in a single thought. One can feel this especially in "The Weed," with its Herbert-like meditation on the birth of a new feeling; in "The Armadillo," which shows the complicity of esthetic pleasures in any grand spectacle, even a scene of suffering; in "Roosters" and "The Fish," those guilty and strangely conciliatory professions of human strength. The best example is the rhetorical turn several stanzas before the end of "The Moose," in which the poet, having overheard a conversation in a bus about somebody's life, pauses to recollect the different voices that told similar stories in her childhood and quietly weighs the inflections of the ageless mutterings of sympathy…. (p. 7)

In four poems above all—"The Map," "The Monument," "At the Fishhouses" and "The End of March"—Bishop announced her task as a poet and confirmed her dedication to it. Varied as they are, these poems have the authority of self-portraits, and they depict her, poignantly at times but always masterfully, as a creator of more than secondary imaginings. Her errors, or wanderings from fact, have for her the finality of fact, and her wish is to make a reader see them that way. (p. 30)

From her very first poems, Bishop's fascination for travel was an interest in seeing the place the map told of, the "lion sun" that you meet after turning away from a dream house "littered with correspondences." She speaks too of the dangers of travel for those nourished on art: The title of "Brazil, January 1, 1502" alludes to the landing of the conquistadors, who brought to the New World what she calls elsewhere "an active displacement in perspective." A "tapestried landscape" was all European eyes were prepared to see in the jungle. The actual landscape, with its terrors, somehow evaded them….

In contrast with this, the other poems Bishop wrote about South America seem done from a traveler's perspective, as if the poet herself, four and a half centuries later, found the natives recalcitrant to all but esthetic treatment and yet had determined not to let them retreat. The poor of Brazil, her adopted country, were illegible and therefore marvelous to her. But for the same reason they were too rich for her poetry: Her portraits of them are half-bodied, insubstantial and oddly toneless for a poet usually so sure of tone. "Manuelzinho," the longest and best-known poem of the group, is an affair of careful high spirits; yet it is a monologue, and Bishop's effort to dissociate herself from the speaker is awkward and perfunctory….

Of the poems written since "Geography III," "Pink Dog" is the most unexpected: a description, full of perverse gusto, of a "depilated dog" with teats hanging to the sidewalk who advises her in instructive tercets to "Dress up! Dress up and dance at Carnival!" An elegy for Robert Lowell also appears in this section. It is rather foreshortened, with an eloquence in the last two stanzas to which the preceding ones have not built a path, but it has great interest as an act of personal friendship that refused to be translated into a gesture of critical sympathy. Lowell's compulsion to change his poetry by rewriting the same poems is compared with nature's seasonal returns: Even the birds seem to say, "repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise."… The remaining new poems in ["The Complete Poems: 1927–1979"], "Santarém" and "Sonnet," confirm one's feeling that in her last years Bishop was working with undiminished powers, even if none of what emerged has the distinction of "The End of March," "In the Waiting Room," "The Moose," "Crusoe in England" or "Five Flights Up"—the poems that appeared together in "Geography III." It seems almost an impertinence to add that of the poets of her generation, with temperaments often more conspicuously adaptable than hers, Elizabeth Bishop alone now seems secure beyond the disputation of schools or the sway of period loyalties. Like all great poets, she was less a maker of poems than a maker of feelings. (p. 31)