From The Guardian:
Elizabeth Bishop's status as one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century is based on the smallest of oeuvres. Some 70 poems were published in her lifetime in four very slim volumes. She died in 1979, aware that her reputation was steadily increasing, eclipsing that of her close friend and fellow poet Robert Lowell. Since her death and the publication of two superb volumes of her correspondence, One Art and Words in Air (letters between her and Lowell) it has grown ever more secure. In the select pantheon of 20th-century poets writing in English, she is placed with TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Wallace Stevens and WH Auden. Her poems often took her years to write and complete, and their formal perfection and the simple, limpid accuracy of their language have always drawn the admiration of other poets. John Ashbery called her “the writer's writer's writer.”
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