When John Ashbery died last year, the New York press reacted as if an epoch had come to a close. The poet is gone, but some witnesses of his generation are still with us. James Bishop is now ninety years old, and still working in the countryside outside Paris. Back in the 1960s, Ashbery succinctly nailed Bishop’s work when he described it as “Post-Painterly Quattrocentro”—“Quattrocentro” because of Bishop’s fierce loyalty to oil paint and to the paradoxical possibilities of the painting as window, and “Post-Painterly” because of his immediate struggle with the work of Robert Motherwell,