Abstract: Elizabeth Bishop, one of the most important poets in the twentieth-century American literary world, is recognized as unique mainly for her objective and the "imaginative" images and the detachment in her poetry. This article attempts to study the tension in Elizabeth Bishop-s poetry based on T. S. Eliot-s "Theory of Impersonality" and to draw a conclusion that Bishop-s tension in poetry comes from two aspects: firstly, her objective imagination; secondly, her evasion of emotion through the revelation of "universal truth" and the strategy of surrealism.