If Molière is right, and everything that isn't verse is prose, and everything that isn't prose is verse, then, with The Collected Prose of Elizabeth Bishop (companion-volume to The Complete Poems, out last year, from the same publisher), we shall have seen all we shall ever get to see of this wonderful author's work…. If the excellence of the Prose is quite unsurprising, then it should only be observed that it is not a separate excellence from that of the poems.

The virtues of the prose are the virtues of the poems: observation, wit, decorum, a sinuous intelligence and above all what Randall Jarrell called her 'moral attractiveness'—no abuse, no indiscretion, no protests. If this sounds prim, it isn't: it's only an indication of how far things have gone the other way…. The prose is odd and pleasant and sympathetic…. The subjects are largely those familiar...