For all the disciplined artifice of Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery, the essays in this collection show that panic plays a crucial role in their work, giving substance to Bishop's claim that "an element of mortal panic and fear" underlines all art. Panic emerges as a condition of creative anxiety and the self-imposed demands of originality in response to the poetic traditions Bishop and Ashbery inherited. These concerns are explored in essays addressed to Bishop and Ashbery's engagement with European Surrealism as an alternative to the dominant poetics of Modernism and its aftermath in the...