Elizabeth Bishop's critical reputation has grown steadily since her death in 1979. Always a respected poet honored by her peers, Bishop was not well known outside the poetry circles of New York and Boston during her lifetime. Today her poems are widely read and taught in classrooms, and a steady stream of essays and books about her life and work has followed since the publication of The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 in 1983. One can account for this extraordinary attention in several ways: the rise of feminist scholarship and the attendant search for neglected female writers; the continuing respect for Bishop's poems shown by teachers and other poets; and most important, the simultaneous profundity and accessibility of the poems and the remarkable appeal of the distinctive and personal voice in which they are written.

Elizabeth Bishop was born the only child of William Thomas Bishop and Gertrude May Boomer Bishop on...