I have been thinking about the paradox of poetry's ability to show itself forth even while its maker seeks to remain hidden in it, because a book titled The Complete Poems: 1927–1979, by Elizabeth Bishop, has just been published…. [Elizabeth Bishop] was praised to the skies by Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell, two poets who were quite tough, very acute readers. Lowell said: "I don't think anyone alive has a better eye than she has: The eye that sees things and the mind behind the eye that remembers." And Jarrell said, "They have a sound, a feel, a whole moral and physical atmosphere different from anything else I know. They are honest, modest, minutely observant, masterly…. The more you read her poems, the better and fresher, the more nearly perfect they seem…. These are what poems ought to be!" [See CLC, Vol. 4.]

As for Elizabeth Bishop's "eye," her friend...