SOURCE: "I Am (Not) This: Erotic Discourse in Bishop, Olds, and Stevens," in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, Fall, 1995, pp. 234-54.

Ostriker is an American poet, critic, editor, and educator. In the following excerpt from a comparative essay on Olds, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens, she examines Olds's treatment of the theme of Eros, or erotic love. Ostriker concludes that although there are similarities between Bishop's and Olds's concepts of Eros, Bishop successfully addresses this theme and Olds does not.

I would like to talk about erotic discourse in poetry in its widest and most archaic sense, beginning with the proposal that what Adrienne Rich today calls "The drive / to connect[,] The dream of a common language" ("Origins and History of Consciousness") has for millennia been understood and experienced as the body and soul's desire, as simultaneously natural and divine, and as source of intense pleasure, intense...