In her lifetime Elizabeth Bishop was appreciated as a writer's writer (John Ashbery once called her "the writer's writer's writer"). But since her death in 1979 her reputation has grown, and today she is recognized as a major twentieth-century poet. Critics and biographers now habitually praise Bishop's mastery of her art, but all too often they have little to say about how her poetry does its sublime work--in the ear and in the mind's eye.