true poet at heart who moved with almost elfin grace amid, yet superior to, the difficulties of an art traditionally chained and fettered by strict rhyme and meter. "How to Treat Elves", a widely anthologized poem, describes a conversation with "The wee-est little elf". The elf tells the narrator "'I dance 'n fwolic about . . . 'n scuttle about and play.'" In four stanzas he describes his activities: surprising butterflies, "fwightening" Mister Mole by jumping out and saying "Boo", swinging on cobwebs, and so forth. He asks the narrator "what do you think of that?" The narrator replies: "It gives me sharp and shooting pains To listen to such drool." I lifted up my foot and squashed The God damn little fool. Alison Lurie calls the poem "a brilliant counterattack" against "a particularly cloying sort of supernatural whimsy" that was fashionable in the early 20th century. Taking up the poet R. C. Trevelyan's challenge (in Thamyris, or Is There a Future for Poetry?) to write on a modern subject "and dispute Virgil's supremacy in this field", Bishop produced "Gas and Hot Air". It describes the operation of a car engine; "Vacuum pulls me; and I come! I come!" cries the gasoline, which reaches [T]he secret bridal chamber where The earth-born gas first comes to kiss its bride, The heaven-born and yet inviolate air Which is, on this year's models, purified. "Ozymandias Revisited", also widely anthologized, reproduces the first two stanzas of Shelley's poem verbatim, but closes: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Also the names of Emory P. Gray, Mr. and Mrs. Dukes, and Oscar Baer Of 17 West 4th St., Oyster Bay. Bishop's 1950 poem "Song of the Pop-Bottlers", again widely anthologized, starts: Pop bottles pop-bottles In pop shops; The pop-bottles Pop bottles Poor Pop drops. It is described as among "poems to be said as fast as possible". One stanza of Bishop's "We Have Been Here Before" reads I had the same sense of persistence On the site of the seat of the Sioux; I heard in the teepee the sound of a sleepy Pleistocene grunt. It was you. The poet Louis Untermeyer described the poem as "a fine burlesque of a hundred stereotyped nostalgias". In his introduction to What Cheer, his own 1945 compendium of "American and British humorous and