“The Subtraction of Emotion in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop,” in The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter, 1992, pp. 48-61.

In the following essay, Lensing discusses Bishop's refusal in her poetry to see herself as a victim or to express too much emotion.

I said to myself: three days and you'll be seven years old. I was saying it to stop the sensation of falling off the round, turning world into cold, blue-black space. But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them. Why should you be one, too? 

With these lines from “In the Waiting Room,” Elizabeth Bishop describes an event that occurred at the dentist's office in Worcester, Massachusetts, on February 5, 1918. Her Aunt Consuelo emits an “oh! of pain” from the dentist's chair in an adjoining room, a cry in which the seven-year-old girl instantly and spontaneously joins. The young...