“The Iceberg and the Ship,” in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXV, No. 4, Fall, 1996, pp. 704-19.

In the following essay, Stevenson discusses the development of Bishop's poetry, her major influences, and personal experiences that affected her work.

Elizabeth Bishop's poetry is an acquired taste, but one that easily turns other poets into addicts. John Ashbery said of her once that she was a “writer's writer's writer”—a description that hardly explains the breadth of her appeal. In the early 1960s, when I first discovered “The Fish” in a college anthology, she was chiefly praised for the finely observed details she “painted” into her poems. Who else would liken a hooked fish to ancient rose-patterned wallpaper, or imagine its flesh “packed in like feathers” and its swim-bladder “like a big peony”?

No wonder that in England, during the 1970s, the so-called Martian poets hailed Elizabeth Bishop as a predecessor. If...