Bartlett's most notable achievements include:

* Creation of a new form of poetry, "the twelve-tone poem," adapting Arnold Schoenberg's musical system to the verbal, accented sounds of language. Called "the Emily Dickinson of the 20th Century," her concise lyrics have been praised by poets, musicians, and composers alike.

* Publication of 16 books of poetry, a group of edited anthologies, and more than 1,000 poems, short stories, and essays published, for example, in Harper's, Virginia Quarterly, New York Times, North American Review, Saturday Review, Prairie Schooner, and in numerous international collections.

* Recipient of many fellowships, grants and awards, including NEA, PEN Syndicate, fellowships at the Huntington Hartford Foundation, Montalvo, Yaddo, MacDowell, Dorland Mt. Colony and Ragdale, travel grants, and honors for introducing literature as part of the Olympics.

* Founder of the Literary Olympics, to restore literature, specifically poetry, as a vital part of the Olympics as it once had been in ancient Greece.

Bartlett's poetry came to the attention of leading poets, writers, and critics as diverse as Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Mark Van Doren, Conrad Aiken, Allen Tate, Alfred Kreymborg, Robert Hillyer, Louis Untermeyer, Rolfe Humphries, John Ciardi, Richard Eberhart, Richard Wilbur, Maxine Kumin, Robert M. Hutchins, Kenneth Rexroth, William Stafford, and others. Over the years, Bartlett maintained an active and extensive correspondence with eminent poets, writers, and literary critics; evident throughout this collected literary correspondence are strong statements attesting to the importance of her work. Extensive permanent collections of Elizabeth Bartlett's papers, literary correspondence, publications, unpublished manuscripts, and art have been established, one as part of the Archive for New Poetry maintained by the Mandeville Department of Special Collections at the University of California, San Diego, and the second by the Rare Books Collection of the University of Louisville. Bartlett's readings of her poetry have been recorded for the Library of Congress, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and other collections.

Bartlett's twelve-tone form of poetry was introduced in her book, Twelve-Tone Poems, published in 1968. In Bartlett's words: "The 12-tone poem is a new form.... It was inspired by Arnold Schoenberg's musical system. The poem consists of 12 lines, divided into couplets. Each couplet contains 12 syllables, using the natural cadence of speech. The accented sounds of the words are considered tones. Only 12 tones are used throughout the poem, repeated various times. As a result, the poem achieves a rare harmony that is purely lyrical, enriching its imagery and meaning."

About this work, Allen Tate wrote: "The new form is most interesting, the poems quite beautiful and distinguished." Encouraged by this and other commendatory responses to her twelve-tone poems by poets, musicians, and composers including Stephen Sondheim, Bartlett continued to develop the new form. The House of Sleep, published in 1975, was the result, consisting of 62 poems related to dreams and written in the new form. Of these poems, William Stafford wrote: "There is a trancelike progression in these poems, in which all unfolds quietly, with a steady holding of a certain pervasive tone." Robert M. Hutchins wrote: "I am much impressed. The poems seem to me what is called an important contribution, and a beautiful one."

A third collection of twelve-tone poems, In Search of Identity, was published in 1977, further establishing the diversity and versatility of ways in which Bartlett was able to make use of the new form. A fourth collection of twelve-tone poems was published in 1981, Memory Is No Stranger.

Her husband, Paul Alexander Bartlett (1909 – 1990) was an American writer, artist, and poet. He made a large-scale study of more than 350 Mexican haciendas, published novels, short stories, and poetry, and worked as a fine artist in a variety of media. For more detailed information about his life and work, see the Wikipedia article [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Alexander_Bartlett].