EDGAR ALLAN POE & THE JUKE-BOX

Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments.

By Elizabeth Bishop.

Edited by Alice Quinn. 367 pp.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.

You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Granted, our culture owes its shape to plenty of other forces -- Hollywood, Microsoft, Rachael Ray -- but nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop (1911-79). That she worked in one of our country's least popular fields, poetry, doesn't matter. That she was a woman doesn't matter. That she was gay doesn't matter. That she was an alcoholic, an expatriate and essentially an orphan -- none of this matters. What matters is that she left behind a body of work that teaches us, as Italo Calvino once said of literature generally, ''a method subtle and flexible enough to be the same thing as an absence of any method whatever.'' The publication of ''Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box,'' which gathers for the first time Bishop's unpublished material, isn't just a significant event in our poetry; it's part of a continuing alteration in the scale of American life.

Just don't expect that change to be announced with a fanfare. In a tribute to Bishop, James Merrill famously noted her ''lifelong impersonations of an ordinary woman,'' and the observation applies to her writing as much as to comportment. From the beginning, Bishop's work was descriptive rather than assertive, conversational rather than rhetorical and discreet rather than confessional. (It was also hard to come by: in her lifetime, she published only around 90 poems.) This was surprising for two reasons. First, her approach was completely unlike the modes favored by her more flamboyant peers -- Robert Lowell, John Berryman -- as well as the guts-spilling styles they helped inspire. Second, if you believe art mirrors life, reticence is the opposite of what you'd anticipate from Bishop, whose biography contains enough torment to satisfy St. Sebastian. An abbreviated list: her father died when she was a baby; her mother vanished into an insane asylum when Bishop was 5; her college boyfriend committed suicide when she refused to marry him and sent her a parting postcard that said, ''Go to hell, Elizabeth''; and the great love of her life, Lota de Macedo Soares, with whom she spent many years in Brazil, fatally overdosed in Bishop's apartment. From a writer with a history like that, we might expect announcements like Lowell's ''I hear/ my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell.'' We don't expect to be told ''I caught a tremendous fish.''

This curious restraint has been admired by many critics (Bishop won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award), but it also explains why she so often has been identified with words like ''quiet,'' ''charming,'' ''scrupulous'' and, above all, ''modest'' -- all of them perfectly useful adjectives, but none that would tip the reader off to the harrowing nature of her life or (more important) the colossal ambition of her poems. Even her admirers sometimes struggle to forgive her for seeming so remarkably . . . unremarkable. Dana Gioia, a longtime Bishop advocate and current chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, gets only a few paragraphs into an essay on her reputation's dramatic rise in the poetry world after her death before asking, almost apologetically, ''Is Elizabeth Bishop overrated?'' ''Perhaps a bit,'' he answers, which presumably is what you say when you've gotten in the habit of thinking about poetry so much that you forget Bishop's poems are less well known to many people than the lyrics to ''Total Eclipse of the Heart.''

So why do we feel compelled to elevate Bishop while simultaneously worrying that we're raising her too high? In large part, the answer has to do with the difference between difficulty and subtlety. Difficulty is a beloved concept in the poetry world, because it's the crux of an old but cherished argument: Are poems too obscure? Or not obscure enough? The debate is a canned one, of course, but it lets all parties make their favorite points, and everyone is therefore happy to argue over ''difficulty'' at the drop of a hat. The reality, though, is that most readers and writers aren't actually made nervous by ''difficulty,'' at least as the term is usually meant. For one thing, difficulty is straightforward -- you either figure out what's difficult, or you don't. You might fail, but you aren't going to be misled. (In this sense, and in its implicit endorsement of hard work, difficulty is a concept that has long been central to our shared identity as Americans). Subtlety is different, though. Subtlety wants to be missed by all but the chosen few; it is aloof, withholding and aristocratic -- sometimes manipulative and always disguised. It has less to do with theory and technique, which can be learned mechanically, than with style and sensibility, which require intuition. It wants to be looked at but not seen. It's unnerving.

It's also exactly what distinguishes Bishop's greatest poetry, which is why it's so hard to be entirely comfortable with this writer, or to know where she belongs. To begin, there is the peculiar Bishop voice, which is often called faux naif, but is probably closer to faux normal (the imitation isn't of innocence, but stability). On one hand, she can seem perfectly straightforward -- no poet, for instance, starts a poem more matter-of-factly: ''In Worcester, Massachusetts, / I went with Aunt Consuelo / to keep her dentist's appointment.'' And of course, no poet is as enamored of local color: ''The ghosts of glaciers drift / among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack -- / dull, dead, deep pea-cock colors, / each riser distinguished from the next / by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge.'' Yet no one else moves as easily or abruptly into the uncanniest registers of our literature: ''The iceberg cuts its facets from within''; ''Everything only connected by 'and' and 'and' ''; ''More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.'' None of this is difficult, but it's astonishingly subtle and strange. The more one reads a Bishop poem, the greater the sense of huge forces being held barely but precisely in check -- like currents pressing heavily on the glass walls of some delicate undersea installation. It doesn't seem as if the glass will break, but if it were to do so, we'd find ourselves engulfed by what Frost (her truest predecessor) called ''black and utter chaos.''

''Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box'' allows us to see the cracks that could form on those crystalline surfaces. It's no criticism of this collection to say the virtues of Bishop's finished poetry -- style and poise chief among them -- are often missing from the writing gathered here. These are, after all, pieces that Bishop herself chose not to publish, but found valuable for some reason; as this volume's editor, Alice Quinn, poetry editor of The New Yorker, noted in a recent interview, ''A big part of the pleasure and understanding to be gained is in knowing what was on her mind during those years and in discovering new phrasing of hers, new avenues of vision.'' In addition to drafts of poems -- some accompanied by photos of the manuscript pages in question, all following Bishop's often handwritten versions as closely as possible -- Quinn has gathered several prose pieces, including an intriguing series of notes that begins, ''Writing poetry is an unnatural act.'' Essentially, this is a book for two groups of people: Bishop fans (most of the poetry world, that is), and the increasingly tiny group who still think this poet was an unambitious and slightly chilly minor writer. The former will be grateful for the insight into her meticulous process; the latter will have to acknowledge the enormous patience and skill that allowed her to hold the volcanic feeling on exhibit here in the poised vessels of her finished poetry. Lest you think that's overstating the emotional content of these drafts, consider the presence of such decidedly un-Bishopian lines as: ''I have suffered from abnormal thirst -- / I swear it's true -- and by the age / of twenty or twenty-one I had begun / to drink, & drink -- I can't get enough.''

That shouldn't, however, be taken to mean that the poems here are all unformed, lesser efforts. If some of this work is mostly of interest because of what it tells us about Bishop's published writing, other pieces can stand alongside anything The New Yorker got its hands on back in the 1950's or 60's. ''Vague Poem'' plays on a confusion between rock roses and rose rocks; it concludes:

Rose-rock, unformed, flesh beginning, crystal by crystal,

clear pink breasts and darker, crystalline nipples,

rose-rock, rose-quartz, roses, roses, roses,

exacting roses from the body,

and the even darker, accurate, rose of sex --

This openly erotic approach is actually more successful than much of her published love poetry, which is considerably less forthcoming. Equally strong are several of the poems intended for a sequence called ''Bone Key,'' and parts of the later poem ''Keaton,'' which has one of Bishop's finest, saddest openings -- ''I will be good; I will be good.'' Quinn's notes throughout are superb. In glossing ''Vague Poem,'' for example, she meticulously connects a particular phrase to a speech given by Bishop in 1976, discusses the poet's interest in crystallography and includes another, earlier erotic fragment that recalls the more finished poem she is annotating. This is the devoted editing this material needed and deserved.

A few days after her death in 1979, Elizabeth Bishop's obituary in The New York Times noted that she ''enjoyed extraordinary esteem among critics and fellow poets'' but was ''less widely known than contemporaries such as Robert Lowell.'' One can only imagine how Lowell and Bishop, lifelong friends, would have thought about the comparison. In any case, though, things have changed. The world of contemporary poetry can be a fractious place, but one thing almost everyone agrees on is the significance of Elizabeth Bishop -- and that's as it should be. Our greatest poets aren't monuments to be looked at but grammars to be absorbed; however long it takes, we speak through them and they through us. ''When you write my epitaph,'' Bishop once wrote to Lowell, ''you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.'' Lonely? Maybe once, but not anymore -- and never again.