SOURCE: Irimia, Mihaela. “The Art of Losing: W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Bishop.” Critical Survey 6, no. 3 (1994): 361-65.

In the following essay, Irimia examines the connection between the works of Bishop and W. H. Auden.

In the Houghton Collection of the Harvard College Library can be found material from the library of Elizabeth Bishop, signed, and with reading marks and marginalia. Two volumes by Wystan Auden, The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962), and Epistle to a Godson, and Other Poems (1972), bear the traces of Bishop's reading. The typescript comments have been removed and shelved as *87M-21. They share a space with newspaper clippings now gathered in box *87EB-445a, and make up a geography whose landmarks count names as diverse as those of Dylan Thomas, Brecht, Pavese, Camões, John Clare, Ashbery, Robert Lowell, and Helen Vendler.

Geography is certainly a favourite Bishop term, and, trying to draw up...