A good poetry day at the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Ben Downing reviews Daisy Hay's Young Romantics, a book that's been knocking around in my Kindle app for the past couple of months. Further in, Brenda Wineapple reviews Michael Sledge's first novel about Elizabeth Bishop, The More I Owe You.

Reading the Wineapple review left me reflecting on how teaching about Bishop has evolved over the past twenty years. When I first studied Bishop she was presented as a prim, patient poet, one with an impeccable eye for detail. Had I studied her twenty years prior to that, I think there would have been something more obviously demeaning in this presentation, as if her precision were the result of modest goals. In fact, I've been told throughout my career that Bishop is a major, one of the major, American poets. If her status relative to Lowell has shifted, this probably reflects Lowell's decline at least as much as it does Bishop's elevation.

What has changed about Bishop, however, is how readers respond to her biography. Partially this reflects a growing willingness among critics to consider facts about an author relevant as methodologies of cultural studies have undermined the splendid isolation texts maintained from The New Criticism through Yale School deconstruction. Yet critical shifts alone don't account for the difference between the Bishop I teach and the Bishop I learned.

Readings of Bishop I encountered as a student seemed to reinforce, and maybe be complicit in, the reticence of Bishop's own poetry. Often used as a foil to Lowell, Plath, Sexton and Berryman, Bishop was the poet of careful observation, whose personal life was largely irrelevant to her poems. What makes this anonymous reading of Bishop so perverse, in retrospect, is just how facinating her life is, as Sledge's novel attests. More than that though, understanding at least part of Bishop's autobiography makes so many of her poems, particularly the great poems from Questions of Travel and Geography III more resonant and more comprehensible.

The Bishop I know now is more daring than the miniaturist that I encountered twenty years ago. Her reticence seems testament to her transgressive life and loves as much as it is a sign of her prim aestheticism and eye for detail. She is a woman who simply can't confess; the stakes of confession are so much higher for her than they are for a poet like Lowell. Similarly, I once viewed Bishop's relatively sparse output only as a sign of her exacting standards. Doubtless those standards account for much of her limited productivity compared to poets like Lowell or Berryman, but so too does her struggle with alcohol. (Not that Lowell and Berryman didn't join in this struggle themselves.)

What I like so much about today's Bishop is her bravery. I always admired Bishop's much-praised eye, but until a few years ago, I don't think I understood how brave she was in her homelessness, and how this bravery made her, in some ways, the first really hemispheric poet. With her childhood in Canada, her soujourns in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C, her long and passionate loves in Brazil, Bishop is a poet who belongs to the Americas, in some ways even more than Neruda or Whitman do. We were always right to love her for her details, but I'm glad we've begun to love her for the many boundaries she crossed as well.