Elizabeth Bishop: One Art

This remarkable New Jersey poet-physician established an American kind of poem distinct from European forms. His work demonstrates an innovative use of common objects and experience as topics for poems as well as formal experiments with the cadences of actual American speech.

The hero of Wallace Stevens’s poetry is the human imagination. Like Emily Dickinson’s, Stevens’s sedate and uneventful outer life concealed a lush and adventurous inner one. Such adventures were for Stevens not an escape from reality but a journey toward a new reality. Although Stevens was no philosopher–he was a bold and brilliant poet–he explored the workings of the human mind with a precision philosophers might envy.