Sam Leith, The Daily Telegraph

What the poet wants is not always what's best

What duties do we owe the dead? Two rather different writers - Stephen King and Elizabeth Bishop - are the occasion for my wondering. King's new book, Lisey's Story, begins with the widow of a celebrated writer going through his effects. She's under pressure from scholars and fans to release unpublished manuscripts.

"There were lots of words for the stuff Scott had left behind. The only one she completely understood was memorabilia, but there was another one, a funny one, that sounded like incuncabilla. That was what the impatient people wanted, the wheedlers, and the angry ones - Scott's incuncabilla. Lisey began to think of them as Incunks."

The Incunks got their way with Elizabeth Bishop. Later this month, Carcanet publishes Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-box, an edition of Bishop's uncollected poems, drafts and fragments, assembled by the New Yorker's poetry editor, Alice Quinn

When the book was originally published in America last year, the critic Helen Vendler attacked Quinn's decision to publish. They should have been titled Repudiated Poems, she said: "Had Bishop been asked whether her repudiated poems, and some drafts and fragments, should be published after her death, she would have replied, I believe, with a horrified 'No'."

The row is all the fiercer because Bishop's working methods were so formidably controlled. The story is often told of how she'd hang fragments of poems - lines, phrases - on walls, and shift them around, returning endlessly in search of the exact word. Sometimes a poem could take decades to complete. Bishop at one point wrote to her favourite aunt, Grace Bulmer Bowers, to tell her that she was writing a new poem called The Moose, and was planning to dedicate it to her. Grace had died by the time the poem was finished. It is one of her finest.

Bishop knew what she was about. Bishop was careful. Bishop minded. And Bishop published nothing that was not, in her own terms, perfect. Her Complete Poems, published posthumously, gathers work written between 1927 and 1979. It is fewer than 300 pages long, and yet I don't remember ever meeting a poet, or a serious reader of poetry, who doesn't regard Bishop as being among the very best of the last century.

So should we have left it there? It's hard to resist temptation. Beautifully and fascinatingly annotated, Quinn's edition shows more explicitly the depth of feeling that was so carefully lashed and harnessed in the published work. It contains facsimiles of manuscripts, with doodles and drawing. It admits squibs - such as a charming poem addressed to a friend's toddler.

You can see Bishop's own voice - homey, spry, utterly under control - emerging. And in some cases you can see the great poems themselves emerging. The book ends with a sequence of 16 drafts of her most anthologised poem, 'One Art', through which you can see it homing to the villanelle form in which it ended up. It is a complete treasure-house.

But, again, should we have left it there? Instances of writers seeking to withhold or even destroy work they considered unsatisfactory are legion. We lost Philip Larkin's diaries to a bonfire. Likewise, the second part of Gogol's Dead Souls. Had his friend Max Brod obeyed Kafka - "My last testament will be very simple: a request that you burn everything" - we'd have no Kafka. Had Virgil's friends acquiesced to the poet's last wishes, we'd have no Aeneid. Had Emily Dickinson got her way, it's a fair guess that the "founding mother of American poetry" would have been someone else altogether.

At other times, they change their own minds. When Dante Gabriel Rossetti lost his wife, he buried most of his unpublished poems with her. An ineffably romantic gesture, you might think. But a bit later on, he changed his mind, dug her up, retrieved the poems and published them.

Sorry Lisey. Sorry Mrs Rossetti. Sorry Professor Vendler. I'm with the Incunks. Among my treasures is a facsimile of the draft typescript of Allen Ginsberg's wonderful long poem Howl, with manuscript annotations. Who knew that "starving, hysterical, naked" started life as the inferior "starving, mystical, naked"?

Had Bishop not allowed her papers to be archived, and had Quinn not embarked on her project, we would have lost something. Perhaps not something vital to the canon, but something that matters to anyone who cares about her. And Bishop herself, in 'One Art', tells us all about what losing things is like: The art of losing isn't hard to master;/ so many things seem filled with the intent/ to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

The poem meanders through a catalogue of losses - door-keys, the odd hour, her mother's watch, cities, continents, a loved one - and comes up, at the end, to a declaration: [...] It's evident/ the art of losing's not too hard to master/ though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.