With its calmly circumscribed being and elegant finish, deploying space in formally perfect patterns, each small portfolio of [Elizabeth Bishop's] work resembled classical architecture.

Living in Brazil most of the time, Bishop was unaffected by the shifts in fashion, the catholicity of taste and often bitter factionalism that have marked American poetry since the end of World War II … yet she has appealed to poets as radically different as Frank O'Hara, Robert Lowell, Octavio Paz and John Ashbery. Lowell, for example, has praised her "tone of large, grave tenderness and sorrowful amusement," while Ashbery, citing her "quirkiness" and "rightness of vision," has singled out her grandeur, "which, because it remains rooted in everyday particulars, never sounds 'grand,' but is as quietly convincing as honest speech."

What accounts for such acclaim? Bishop's brilliant technique certainly. But her spare descriptive style is remote from the luxuriant randomness, the sleek...