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 reverses that of other postmodernists: in her work, it is not art that is reduced to experience, but experience that tends to be reduced to art. The "objective" world of experience in Bishop is never a natural source but always an already represented world, and this given, original distance informs her poetry. For Bishop's uniqueness does not lie in her peculiar sensibility, as the largely descriptive criticism of her work—encouraged by her own irreverence toward theoretical discussions of poetry—would suggest.

For a more adequate assessment of Bishop's poetic, which remains consistent throughout her career, we might start with a poem like "The Gentleman of Shalott." Here, she rewrites Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott," revising its opposition of reality and imagination. Tennyson's "Lady" represents the psyche as dwelling in an islanded, inner space of reflection, and such a figure implies a mutually exclusive relationship between the inner and the outer. (pp. 341-42)

In Bishop's "revision" of the poem, the dichotomy of inner and outer disappears; the bilateral symmetry of the human body renders her "gentleman" a mirror image of himself…. Bishop internalizes the mirror, replacing the subject-object duality not with a unity but with a duplication at the source. The dividing line lies within, and the "center" is itself a reflection…. With the internalization of the duplication, which preempts the inside-outside dichotomy, the spatial and temporal distinction between an original (nature, fact, or experience) and a subsequent reproduction (a copy, reflection, or art) vanishes. It is impossible to tell which side is the original and which the duplicate; since the "modesty" of the postromantic, peripheral man questions the need for two of him, however, only one side can be him, and the other must be a mirror image. There must be a duplication, then, but it is an atemporal, ahistorical doubling. (pp. 342-44)

"The Gentleman of Shalott" has significant implications for Bishop's poetics, for the confusion between the original and the representation, the uncertainty and alienation, are built into the "gentleman." Duplication, the formative principle enabling his existence, constitutes the beginning of discourse; it constitutes also the end or limits of discourse, for the "original" is itself a "reflection." If one starts with two halves without an historical order of priority and lateness, one inhabits a metaphor, the two terms of which—the tenor and the vehicle—are simply equal and coeval in a world "littered with old correspondences."… Indeed, the implications of "The Gentleman of Shalott" go beyond the poetic. The bilateral symmetry of the body and binary logic—which also demarcates and duplicates in order to generate distinctions and meanings—are themselves mirror images. In this hall of mirrors, the dialectic between Tennyson's and Bishop's poetics, or even the distinction between ladies and gentlemen, may be reduced to the same central pattern, thereby reducing physiological "distinctions" themselves to human duplications. The limitation of this arrangement is solipsism, hinted at by the disappointment registered in the enjambment of "his hands can clasp one / another." Yet the precariousness of the gentleman's position exhilarates: "The uncertainty / he says he / finds exhilarating." The line "he says he" both sets his limits and sets him free. The solipsistic flanking of "says" with two "he"'s suggests that the saying itself is the center that divides and duplicates; it is the spine of the duplicitous "book" that he inhabits, binding his fiction and his fact.

Bishop's poetry as a whole questions the priority of experience over representation. For example, her use of letters as visual images to depict nature suggests that representation may even be prior to the original. (pp. 344-45)

"The Map," which begins The Complete Poems, shows why she is interested less in landscape than in its representation on a map, of which her poem is yet another representation. The naiveté of the observer in the poem points up the thoroughly conventional nature of cartography. Representational artifacts, which help us navigate in the world, express a consensus and must be conventional. Yet representation liberates as well as limits. The rift between the original and its representation constitutes an "exhilarating" uncertainty that leads to discovery by prompting questions one could not put to a landscape alone or to a map as a merely conventional artifact. Only when the map is seen as a new landscape equal to its original is there room for questions and answers, thoughts and feelings. (p. 346)

By questioning the priority of nature, Bishop can inhabit a reflected and therefore thoroughly human world. For representations counter nature: they "re-verse" the world, turn it around, and right its wrong. (p. 349)