[From] the very start, there was something about [Elizabeth Bishop's] work for which elegantly standard literary analysis was not prepared. Readers have been puzzled, as when [Stephen Stepanchev] writes about "Florida": "the poet's exuberance provides a scattering of images whose relevance to the total structure is open to question. It is as though Miss Bishop stopped along the road home to examine every buttercup and asphodel she saw." [See CLC, Vol. 4.] First of all, Bishop writes about alligators, mangrove swamps, skeletons and shells—things exotic and wild, not prettified. More important, there is some notion of neat and total structure which the critic expects and imposes, but which the poem subverts. What makes the quoted critic nervous is a quality which becomes more and more prominent in Bishop's work—her apparent lack of insistence on meanings beyond the surface of the poem, the poem's seeming randomness and disintegration...