Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop: Friendship and Influence

Author(s): Bonnie Costello

Source: Twentieth Century Literature , Summer - Autumn, 1984, Vol. 30, No. 2/3,
Marianne Moore Issue (Summer - Autumn, 1984), pp. 130-149
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/441108

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 Marianne Moore and

Elizabeth Bishop:
Friendship and Influence

BONNIE COSTELLO

Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop claimed not to understand

the critical inclination to compare them in reviews and articles, and on
many occasions dismissed anything more than juvenile and superficial
resemblances. Reporting one such conversation with a critic, Moore
wrote to Bishop (June 21, 1959):
You have sometimes asked what I thought, Elizabeth; but even if
you ever took my advice, did you ever get to sound like me? or I
like you? You sound like Lope de Vega and I sound like Jacob
Abbot or Peter Rabbit.1

Such remarks ought to be fair warning against elaborate claims of

influence. Nevertheless, this was one of the most abiding and signifi-
cant literary friendships in either woman's career, so that the nature
and evolution of that friendship should be of interest to readers o
their poetry.
As women and as writers, Moore and Bishop were kindred spirits.
But they complemented as much as mirrored each other in their
friendship. The Protestant poet of manners and morals, Moore, and
the skeptic poet of mysteries, Bishop, approached life and language
from separate vantage points, but their enduring friendship centered
in the intersection of their angles of vision.
It is tempting to read their relationship within a mother/daughter
paradigm. Twenty-two years older than Bishop, unmarried and child-
less, Moore may have found in her young friend an object of maternal
affection and concern. Such attention was certainly missing in Bishop's

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 MOORE AND ELIZABETH BISHOP

life. Her father died when she was eight months old. Her
came permanently insane in 1916, when Bishop was seve
in 1934, the same year she met Moore. Moore's parental
filial attitudes show themselves most often in the letters of the first ten
years, later letters demonstrating a growing mutuality, although with
continued deference on Bishop's part. But neither poet thought of
their relationship in this way. Though fully self-conscious about the
obstacles confronting women artists, they did not think of their lives or
their art in specifically feminist terms. We may, retrospectively, recog-
nize their aesthetic or personal choices as determined by an inherent
feminism, but we should also recognize how multi-faceted their com-
mon interests were, addressed to both wider and more specific issues
than the experience of women in patriarchal society. The category of
mentor and protegee makes a better fit. Moore schooled Bishop in the
practice of poetry, not in a visionary stance or a code for living.
Still, art and life, aesthetics and morality, are deeply linked for
both poets. If the nouns of family life (mother, daughter, sister, etc.) do
not quite fit, the verbs still do, not the oedipal verb "struggle" which
dominates our Bloomian notion of literary influence, but the centrally
female verb "nurture." Indeed, when the young Bishop made Moore
the present of a paper nautilus shell, Moore's gift in return was a poem
about mother love and its relationship to writing. While the poem most
directly figures an artist's creative gesture (perhaps complimenting
Bishop for her care and devotion as a writer), it might also stand for
the relation between mentor and protegee.

The Paper Nautilus

For authorities whose hopes
are shaped by mercenaries?
Writers entrapped by
teatime fame and by
commuters' comforts? Not for these
the paper nautilus
constructs her thin glass shell.

Giving her perishable

souvenir of hope, a dull
white outside and smooth-
edged inner surface
glossy as the sea, the watchful
maker of it guards it
day and night; she scarcely

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

eats until the eggs are hatched.

Buried eightfold in her eight
arms, for she is in
a sense a devil-
fish, her glass ram's-horn-cradled freight
is hid but is not crushed;
as Hercules, bitten

by a crab loyal to the hydra,

was hindered to succeed,
the intensively
watched eggs coming from
the shell free it when they are freed,-
leaving its wasp-nest flaws
of white on white, and close-

laid Ionic chiton-folds

like the lines in the mane of
a Parthenon horse,
round which the arms had
wound themselves as if they knew love
is the only fortress
strong enough to trust to.2

The poem describes a careful balance between firmness and gentleness

by which the nautilus nurtures her eggs. She is indeed a strong figur
compared to Hercules, to a Parthenon horse and ram's horn, but also a
delicate figure. Like the wasp nest she combines the Greek qualities of
fortitude and refinement. Her power of love and support surpasses bu
encompasses the power of force. And this love is not possessive or
narcissistic, it is "hindered to succeed" for "the intensively watched egg
coming from the shell free it when they are freed." That mutual
freedom meant an acknowledgment of and respect for difference. We
see that difference most clearly from the point of view of Bisho
emerging poetic identity.
The partnership between Moore and Bishop is in part that be-
tween the gentlewoman and the seeker. I mean no value judgment
here, for the gentlewoman looks after the good and the beautiful (or
the good as the beautiful) while the seeker looks after the true. Of
course in the Platonic realm these three are one, and even in this less
perfect realm they often overlap. But each poet defined a point of view
in this triadic scheme. Moore approached vision from the point of view
of values, Bishop approached values from the point of view of vision,
and these points of view carried implicit priorities that sometimes

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 MOORE AND ELIZABETH BISHOP

required choice. Our predilection in this doubting age is nat

the poetry of the seeker, but Bishop was deeply attracted t
civility, and more profoundly the metamorphic power,
charmed imagination. Remembering the gentle and gentile q
Moore's mind, Bishop quotes Hopkins' letter to Robert Br
the ideal of the "gentleman":
"... to be a gentleman is but on the brim of morals and rather a
thing of manners than morals properly ... [a] chastity of mind
which seems to lie at the very heart and be the parent of all
good, the seeing at once what is best, and holding to that, and
not allowing anything else whatever to be even heard pleading to
the contrary."3
For Hopkins, it should be noted, where there arises a choice between
artist and gentleman the artist must be despised. In her essay "Efforts
of Affection," from which this quotation is taken, Bishop presents an
amused but also deeply affectionate and admiring portrait of her
friend, summed up with these alternative epithets: "manners and
morals; manners as morals? Or is it morals as manners?"4 Finally, it does
not matter. Moore, as Bishop describes her, is a figure both
mannered-eccentric, flirtatious, self-conscious-and mannerly: deco-
rous, tasteful, virtuous in the deepest sense, a figure committed undi-
videdly to civilized values. In Moore, surfaces and styles of behavior are
the outward shows of inner attitudes. Manners express the rock foun-
dation of an ethical system, and aesthetics are rooted to morality.
Moore's evaluative turn of mind pervades every aspect of experience,
from social etiquette to modern warfare. The poetic gestures which
accompany this preoccupation are those of praise, condemnation,
selection, purification, transformation. She insists on these attitudes at a
cost, of course, the cost of comprehensive vision. Moore's is by no
means a naive vision, but she chooses not to depict (only to condemn)
what is infelicitous, tragic, evil in the world. Her real toads are never
repulsive. Bishop's priority of feeling over precept, of psychic authen-
ticity over artistic transformation, of mystery and meaning over man-
ners and morals, causes her to make a different set of poetic gestures,
those of inquiry, evocation, elegy, exposure, penetration. If Moore is
the poet of ethics and aesthetics, Bishop is the poet of epistemology and
ontology, asking what we can know and who we are rather than what
we should do and what we should admire or condemn.
Bishop learned a great deal more from her mentor than eit
recognized. Their friendship nurtured certain habits of mind (part
larly of careful observation), certain techniques and standards (of a

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

racy, decorum, musical precision). But from their base of mut

ests and traditions she evolved a voice and style of her own, p
inherited instruments to use in mapping her distinctive w
defining her own aesthetic priorities. Bishop never ceased to l
Moore, as a poet of remarkable skill and discipline, whose grea
dence in the metamorphic powers of art allowed her to sustai
moral vision in a grim world. Bishop's own darker vision t
repeatedly away from sustaining orders, into a receding, a
cherished and ominous prospect.
Answering Anne Stevenson and perhaps qualifying an e
warning against superficial comparisons with Moore, Bishop
1963:
By all means say I'm a friend of Marianne's! I met her in 1934
through the college Librarian, an old friend of hers, and it was
one of the greatest pieces of good fortune in my life!5
This was the beginning of a literary and personal relationship which
was to last until Moore's death in 1972. Usually terrified of famous
people, Bishop recalled (in a letter to Anne Stevenson dated March 6,
1964) the ease she felt in getting to know Moore:
If I really like someone well enough I don't get them
[terrors]-Marianne, for example-the one "celebrity" I have
ever deliberately tried to meet in my life.-We got along im-
mediately.
Among other things, she said, she was attracted to Moore's democratic
sense of people and things, and to her "wit." "Perhaps I need such
people to cheer me up," she wrote to Anne Stevenson January 8,
1964). Moore represented not only the successful career, but the suc-
cessful outlook-a charmed way of being in the world.
In addition to providing serious attention to each other's work,
they shared friends, concern for each other's health, successes and
failures, literary titles and opinions but most of all descriptions-of
objects, events, places. Letter after letter indulges in the mutual plea-
sure of tracing particulars. The subject might be Bishop's cat Minnow,
sights at a circus, an art exhibition, a postcard, a feather, a shell. Their
bond was based in a mutual enchantment with the play of words and
things. The relationship had a practical side as well, for Moore went
out of her way to help Bishop acquire grants and find publishers for
her work (she arranged for her first publication in book form, in the
anthology Trial Balances in 1935). She even typed out a few of her
poems for her. In return she derived vicarious enjoyment from watch-
ing the young poet develop, from hearing about her many travels and

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 MOORE AND ELIZABETH BISHOP

receiving regular "tributes" from exotic places. When B

confidence began to lag, Moore as nurturing parent would
On August 21, 1936, two years after Bishop graduated
she wrote to Moore:
I cannot, cannot decide what to do-I am even considering
studying medicine or bio-chemistry, and have procured all sorts
of catalogues, etc. I feel that I have given myself more than a fair
trial, and the accomplishment has been nothing at all.6
Moore replied on August 28, 1936, recalling Bishop to her natural
vocation:
What you say about studying medicine does not disturb me at
all; for interesting as medicine is, I feel you would not be able to
give up writing, with the ability for it that you have; but it does
disturb me that you should have thefeeling that it might be well
to give it up. To have produced what you have-either verse or
prose is enviable, and you certainly would not suppose that such
method as goes with a precise and proportioning ear, is "con-
temporary" or usual.
Even as late as 1942 Bishop still compared her meager production with
that of Moore and contemporaries, and Moore offered consoling ad-
vice (May 11, 1942):
... don't let writing be a threat ... it is unjust to probity to
reproach oneself for lagging, when often premature and dogged
struggle spoil one's ability to treat the material right at a maturer
and more favorable time.

Bishop never lost the sense of being inadequate to her vocatio

and to Moore's example, but at the same time that example encourage
her in the worth of her own pursuits. Above all, Moore was among th
first to recognize and insist that Bishop had a calling.
Bishop felt Moore's influence strongly for a long time. Sending a
poem on September 15, 1936, she apologizes for "an extremely imp
lite, if true, display of your 'influence.'" A week later, she speaks
"your effect in one's interpretation of other poetry." A few mont
after this (January 5, 1937), she apologizes for having unconscious
"stolen something from 'The Frigate Pelican'" for her story "The S
and Its Shore." She was so impressed in 1942 by Moore's essay
"Humility, Concentration and Gusto" that, she said, she hummed the
title all day. And years later (June 5, 1956) its impression seems to have
remained: "I was interviewed by a journalist friend for a literary news-
paper here, and imitating you, I'm afraid, I said I liked three things in
poetry: Spontaneity, Accuracy, and Mystery." This last imitation of
Moore is perhaps the most revealing, for while the two aphorisms look

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

alike, they suggest important differences in emphasis. Both p

mire "accuracy" (indeed Moore often praised Bishop for her ac
but Moore's sense of accuracy seems more classical-located
nique, moral posture and rhetoric, in the good and the beautif
than in the visionary true. Spontaneity and Mystery were
important to Moore, but they do not top her list. They tend t
the Romantic priorities of the seeker, placing less emphasis on
performance, more on imaginative experience and personal ref
Moore's advice and praise were most often specific to in
poems, but certain emphases emerge in her response which di
fastidiousness of the gentlewoman. Her concern for "nea
finish" dominates her detailed comments on poem after poe
point out infelicities of diction, awkward phrases, redundanci
Miracle for Breakfast," for instance, she writes (December 22,
"in stanza 2, line 2, of the poem, I resist 'bitterly' and 'very' in
in line 3; and 'gallons of' in 4th line from the end." Of "L
Picture" she writes (November 16, 1943): "The thought in the
the aquatic animal is just what is needed; and in prose, 'sighing
high art. But here it seems not so expert as the rest? Perhaps
rhyme, 'air,' that seems a little facile." Moore felt especially s
about the advantages of economy and understatement in art, a
intensifiers-very, all, usually-mercilously. "Perhaps you wo
omit some words, the habit having fastened on me irrem
(March 12, 1937). Moore's mother also read most of Bishop
work, and many of the suggestions, especially omissions of di
explicitness, were, Moore admitted, "contributed." Of "The Sea
Shore" she wrote (December 17, 1936): "Mother is a rabid ad
the power of suggestion versus statement and wishes you need
just at the end that he was drunk." Moore stressed the imp
sound as scintillating surface in poetry, and regularly off
gestions on this aspect of Bishop's work, such as her comment
sestina "A Miracle for Breakfast" (December 22, 1936): "alth
tremble to say so, since you confirm the words more than on
'crumb' and 'sun' almost too nearly the same sound even as a p
Chinese chromatics?" Of a Bishop story she writes on December
17, 1936: "The tempo and fastidious avoidance of night-riding rush
makes me very apprehensive of suggested dispatch at certain points,
but with a grave pace as with staccato effects, one really heightens the
effect, I think, by concealed contrasts?" We see in these details a larger
concern for refinement of surface, economy of style, precision of word
choice as the aesthetic expressions of modesty, restraint, courtesy, judi-

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 MOORE AND ELIZABETH BISHOP

ciousness. In these instances Moore's suggestions did not ch

alternative aesthetic values. Later on, as Bishop's voice deve
own priorities of representational and experiential truth, and
sive vision (pain as well as pleasure addressed) would cause h
over some of Moore's suggestions.
Besides these matters of craft a strong sense of literary p
(or perhaps even censorship, to use a stronger term) often det
Moore's responses. To the poet of manners and morals cert
and phrases simply did not belong in poems. After a num
suggestions about Bishop's war poem "Roosters," which Moo
out with corrections, she writes of her objection to Bishop's u
phrase "water closet" (October 16, 1940):
Regarding the water-closet, Dylan Thomas, W. C. William
Cummings, and others feel that they are avoiding a duty
balk at anything like unprudishness, but I say to them
care about all things equally, I have a major effect to p
and the heroisms of abstinence are as great as the her
courage, and so are the rewards." I think it is to your
Elizabeth, that when I say you are not to say, "water-clos
go on saying it a little (like Donald in National Velvet), an
calculated to make me wonder if I haven't mistaken a cosmetic
patch for a touch of lamp-black, but I think not. The trouble is,
people are not depersonalized enough to accept the picture
rather than the thought.... I acclaimed "the mermaid's pap" in
Christopher [Smart] but few of us, it seems to me, are funda-
mentally rude enough to enrich our work in such ways without
cost. If I tell Mother there is a feather on her dress and she says,
"On my back?" I am likely to say, "No. On your rump," alluding
to Cowper's hare that "swung his rump around." But in my
work, I daren't risk saying, "My mother had a feather on her
rump."
When specific points of revision came packaged with such firm
precepts and values, they must have been very hard to resist. But
perhaps Moore intended them to be resisted to some extent. By con-
fronting Bishop with aesthetic and moral principles she forced the
young poet to consider her own artistic decisions on a larger scale. Such
necessary defenses played a crucial part in Bishop's development,
making her more self-conscious about her artistic intentions.
What I'm about to say, I'm afraid, will sound like ELIZABETH
KNOWS BEST.... However, I have changed to small initial
letters! and I have made several other of your corrections and
suggestions.... But I can't seem to bring myself to give up the
set form, which I'm afraid you think fills the poem with redun-

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

dancies, etc. I feel that the rather rattletrap rhythm is

appropriate-maybe I can explain it.
I cherish my "water-closet" and the other sordidities because
I want to emphasize the essential baseness of militarism. In the
first part I was thinking of Key West, and also of those aerial
views of dismal little towns in Finland & Norway, when the
Germans took over, and their atmosphere of poverty. That's
why, although I see what you mean, I want to keep "tin rooster"
instead of "gold," and not to use "fastidious beds." And for the
same reason I want to keep as the title the rather contemptuous
word ROOSTERS rather than the more classical COCK; and I
want to repeat the "gun-metal" (I also had in mind the violent
roosters Picasso did in connection with his GUERNICA pic-
ture)....
It has been so hard to decide what to do, and I know that
aesthetically you are quite right, but I can't bring myself to
sacrifice what (I think) is a very important "violence" of tone-
which I feel to be helped by what you must feel to be just a bad
case of the threes. It makes me feel like a wonderful Klee picture
I saw at his show the other day, "The Man of Confusion." I
wonder if you could be mesmerized across the bridge to see it
again with me?
I have quoted the letter at length to indicate the detail of Moore's
suggestions, and also Bishop's strong need to find reasons for every
suggestion she turned down. Clearly her emerging aesthetic did not
hold "neatness of finish" so high as naturalness and spontaneity of
effect and did not always hold aesthetic standards above mimetic ones.
Moore's magnificent surfaces and cerebral, civilized manner on the
page contrast early with Bishop's rhetorical simplicity and deliberate
roughness or flatness within the artistic frame. For Bishop, the lan-
guage of poetry is justified by its faithfulness to the texture of experi-
ence rather than to an ideal of taste. (We may be amused by Moore's
suggestion of the title "Cocks" as more classical than Roosters. Moore's
imagination clearly did not entertain vulgar connotations.)
For Moore, ecstacy stimulated art, expediency determined its
forms. Bishop's art emerged from a more troubled vision and its forms
as well are sometimes self-consciously inexpedient. I do not want to
suggest, however, that Bishop's poetics gave license to ugliness or
formlessness as truer to reality. The claims of art to organize, if not
ameliorate, experience were strong for Bishop (if not as strong as in
Moore). Finally, too, the lesson of restraint learned from Moore served
her well in finding an art that intensified truth under the pressure of
artistic control.

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 MOORE AND ELIZABETH BISHOP

For Moore, imaginative orders possess something like t

salvation, however individual. Bishop was no less attracted
to her aesthetic order was a means of heightening the sen
In a letter to Anne Stevenson (March 23, 1964) she wrot
... the real expression of tragedy, or just horror and p
exactly in man's ability to construct, to use form. Th
form of a tubercular Mozart, say, is more profoundly m
any wild electronic wail and tells more about the famo
condition."

The classicist upholds the standard of instruction as high as that of

beauty; dolce, to cite Horace, must have its utile.
Moore was most persuasive, and most influential, when she ques-
tioned the purposiveness of Bishop's art and the depth of its moral
intentions. Bishop did not always meet her standard of usefulness and
instruction. In a letter of March 7, 1937, Moore writes:
I enclose the suggestions I spoke of, about THE LABORS OF
HANNIBAL. Your things have the insidiousness of creativeness,
in that the after impression is stronger than the impression while
reading, but you are menaced by the goodness of your mechan-
ics. One should, of course, have the feeling, this is ingeniously
contrived; but a thing should make one feel after reading it, that
one's life has been altered or added to. When I set out to find
fault with you, there are so many excellences in your mechani
that I seem to be commending you instead, and I wish to sa
above all, that I am sure good treatment is a handicap unles
along with it, significant values come out with an essential bald
ness. I hope the unessential baldness of this attack will not mak
it seem that I am against minutiae.
Such a letter could not but deeply affect a young poet. Another lett
year later reinforced the point and showed Moore's confidence in th
possibility of holding and expressing fundamental beliefs, especi
Christian ones (May 1, 1938):
I feel that although large-scale "substance" runs the risk o
inconsequence through aesthetic impotence, and am one of
those who despise clamor about substance-to whom treatme
really is substance-I can't help wishing you would sometimes in
some way, risk some unprotected profundity of experience
some characteristic private defiance of the significantly detest
able. Continuously fascinated as I am by the creativeness an
uniqueness of these assemblings of yours-which are really
poems-I feel a responsibility against anything that might
threaten you; yet fear to admit such anxiety, lest I influence yo
away from an essential necessity or particular strength. The

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

golden eggs can't be dealt with theoretically, by pre

mass salvation formulae. But I do feel that tentativeness and
interiorizing are your danger as well as your strength....
The wrought excellence and infectious continuity of you
thinkings-the abashingly as I said above-formidable demure
ness, disgust me with my own bald performances, and what
have said sounds preceptorial but such clumsiness perhaps is
better than the conscientious timidity which kept me from writ
ing.
Bishop responded that she had "some severe meditations on the
theme of criticism you imply so gently." But finally she is too skeptical a
poet to offer wisdom in the form of a creed. Perhaps Moore's neoclas-
sical preference for sententiae over obstinate questionings, of maxim
over negative capability, blinded her from the searching vision of
Bishop's descriptions. And Moore's Protestant faith provided her with
certainties to which Bishop did not have access. Bishop worried a great
deal throughout her career about being a "precious" poet, and did
strive increasingly in her verse and fiction for such "profundity of
experience." A distinct deepening occurs after 1938, most apparent in
her last volume, Geography III, but it is not the deepening of moral
guidelines, rather of moral inquiry. Affection for objects continues to
generate the major values in her poetry, though she had a great deal of
doubt about this method. In a letter to Moore (September 11, 1940),
she describes this method:

... I have written a half-dozen phrases that I can still bear to

re-read without too much embarrassment. But I have that con-
tinuous uncomfortable feeling of "things" in the head, like
icebergs or rocks or awkwardly-shaped pieces of furniture-it's
as if all the nouns were there but the verbs were lacking-if you
know what I mean. And I can't help having the theory that if
they are joggled around hard enough and long enough some
kind of electricity will occur, just by friction, that will arrange
everything.
Moore tended to balance her gyroscopic observations on a firm moral
base, secured in epigram, however complex or paradoxical. Her wis-
dom is instructive and evaluative. She offers precepts to live by.
Bishop's tendency, however, was to move toward the moral condition
of uncertainty and mystery, the moral atmosphere of loss, temporality,
memory and desire, the questions we live by.
Nurture requires support as much as instruction. Moore's dis-
cerning praise, which affirmed talent even where it differed from her
own, may have kept Bishop writing even when self-doubt inflicted its

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 MOORE AND ELIZABETH BISHOP

harshest judgments. Letters like the following would have aff

Bishop viewed her own accomplishments (September 20, 1
... the poems are so fine, and dart-proof in every way,-
especially THE WEED and PARIS, 7 AM-that they shiver my
impulsive offers of helpfulness. This exteriorizing of the inte-
rior, and the aliveness all through, it seems to me are the essential
sincerity that unsatisfactory surrealism struggles toward. Yet the
sobriety and weight and impact of the past are also there. The
great amount of care, the reach of the imagination, and the
pleasure conveyed, make it hard for me not to say a great deal;
but I fear to make suggestions lest I hamper you.
In reviews Moore recognizes that Bishop's strengths are tied to what in
her own verse would be weaknesses. Poetry should, she wrote in one
review, "pierce you to the marrow without revolting you," and we feel
that while Bishop may have transgressed that border more often than
her mentor liked, Moore knew that Bishop's aesthetic rested in
exploring that border.7
Reviewing Bishop's North and South, Randall Jarrell immediately
perceived its indebtedness to Moore's work. And while his insights may
not have pleased either poet, they are difficult to refute:
When you read Miss Bishop's "Florida," a poem whose first
sentence begins, "The state with the prettiest name," and whose
last sentence begins, "The alligator who has five distinct calls:
friendliness, love, mating, war, and a warning" you don't need to
be told that the poetry of Marianne Moore was, in the beginning,
an appropriately selected foundation for Miss Bishop's work.8
Jarrell was pointing to their practice of description, of course, their
observationists' capacity for fact, which far exceeded imagism in pur-
suing the path of the particular. Robert Lowell similarly matched their
"elaborate descriptive technique" in his review of North and South.9
Relentless accuracy was not merely a slogan for these poets. In her
1948 essay on Moore, "As We Like It," Bishop celebrated her friend's
"delight of imitation," the same quality Moore had earlier praised in
Bishop's work.10 "As far as I know, Miss Marianne Moore is The
World's Greatest Living Observer." Claiming that Moore had bettered
Hopkins in "feats of description," she paid her highest compliment, for
Hopkins was Bishop's literary father. Accurate description was no
by-product or bonus of expression but a primary literary quality for
Bishop, accompanied by a "ritualistic solemnity" even in light or ironic
poems. Such solemnity (undiminished by other tones) characterizes
many of her own descriptions, as this one from "At the Fishhouses":
"All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, / swelling slowly as if consid-

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

ering spilling over."11 Moore, Bishop argues in "As We Like It," s

"entirely to give herself up to the object under contemplation, to
all sincerity how it is to be it," a self-forgetfulness she woul
admire in Darwin. Intention for these poets should not obscu
surface of things. Bishop sensed in Moore a "compulsion to imitat
an obsessive search for the particular beyond the support of the
eral or ideal. In "Questions of Travel" she examined the same com
sion in herself and concluded with a list of irresistible details which
begins:
But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
(CP, p. 108)
She "goes on" just as Moore often does, if with less iridescent display.
But a comparison of their descriptive acts defines the difference
between the poetry of manners and morals, on the one hand, and that
of moods and mysteries on the other. Moore continually attaches value
to fact, where Bishop attaches yearning, fear, uncertainty. Moore cele-
brates the jerboa, for instance, for its harmony of form and function
in contrast to the waste of Pharaoh's Egypt. Her eye clings to the desert
rat's surfaces, finding in them ideals of economy and modesty that
become aesthetic standards:

it turns its bird head-

the nap directed
neatly back and blending
with the ear which reiterates the slimness
of the body....
... It

honors the sand by assuming its color;

closed upper paws seeming one with the fur
in its flight from a danger.
(CP, p. 14)
Bishop's eye is more likely to focus on loss, on trac
mysterious resemblances to the human which the mind
In "Florida," for instance, the poem Jarrell singles out
qualities, we find a passage Moore would not have w
Enormous turtles, helpless and mild,
die and leave their barnacled shells on the beaches,

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 MOORE AND ELIZABETH BISHOP

and their large white skulls with round eye-sockets

twice the size of a man's.
(CP, p. 32)
Here is tragic rather than exemplary beauty. And while the pass
exudes the deepest moral sadness, it affirms no particular set of valu
offers no "moral." As Moore herself recognized in reviewing Bishop,
is the poetry of knowledge but not of instruction: "at last we ha
someone who knows, who is not didactic."12
The art of personification, scorned by most modernists, is reviv
by these two observationists. They modernize the technique by maki
it an art of reciprocity rather than an imposition on things. "There
morals aplenty in animal life," Bishop writes in "As We Like It," "bu
they have to be studied out by devotedly and minutely observing
animal, not by regarding the deer as a man imprisoned in a 'leath
coat.'" Moore's poetry, she felt, found a balance of self and othe
"With all its inseparable combinations of the formally fabulous with t
factual, and the artificial with the perfectly natural, her animal poe
seduces us to dream of some realm of reciprocity, a true lingua unic
nis." Moore's Plumet Basilisk, Pangolin, Jerboa, Frigate Pelican;
Bishop's Man-Moth, Fish, Rooster, Sandpiper, Giant Toad, Strayed
Crab, Giant Snail, Hanging Mouse, are only a few examples of such
reciprocity at work. A regard for the otherness of what the imagination
fixes on means ultimately a willingness, as Moore wrote, to "relinquish
what one would keep." Moore's Plumet Basilisk dives into water and his
sudden splash "Marks his temporary loss." While "victory filled up the
little rented boat" Bishop must "let the fish go."
For both poets personification was as much a way of getting out-
side the limits of the human perspective as of imposing a human point
of view, though ultimately the aim may be to find themselves anew.
Bishop takes this technique farthest, locating her interest not as Moore
does on the outsides of things, on their behavioral characteristics of
habitat and coloring, but on the inner lives of creatures. She takes on a
voice of things as well as a voice for things. Moore celebrates elephants
for the morals they exemplify, but hesitates to ascribe intention to them
or go beyond what fact will verify. They are "a pilgrims' / pattern of
revery not reverence."
With trunk tucked up compactly-the elephant's
sign of defeat-he resisted, but is the child
of reason now. His straight trunk seems to say: when
what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived.
(CP, p. 129)

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

Moore marks the difference between fact and association. They

say, they offer a pattern for the pilgrim. Bishop's sandpiper ha
identifiable inner life:
The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.
(CP, p. 153)
Bishop's animals represent human fallibility as often as the possibilities
for heroism. She imagines, in fact, how the world would look to us did
we share the sandpiper's point of view, as figuratively we do. Yet the
poem insists on particularity, and ends much as a Moore poem might,
in a list of facts: "The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and
gray, / mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst" (CP, p. 153). We
would see this ourselves had we the sandpiper's scale of vision. "To
a Snail" and "The Man-Moth" offer a sharper contrast in their use of
personification. Moore's snail, a figure for her aesthetic predilections,
suggests by his appearances a "principle that is hid," but her attention is
to the evaluation of surface. A figure for the marriage of manners and
morals, aesthetics and ethics, he demonstrates that "contractility is a
virtue as modesty is a virtue." Bishop's imaginary "man-moth," equally
self-reflective, works from the inside out, exposing the secret side of
the human spirit.
While Jarrell was one of the first to remark on Bishop's indebted-
ness to Moore, he also recognized such significant distinctions. Bishop,
he said is "simpler, milder, less driven into desperate straits or dens of
innocence, and taking this century of Polycarp (martyr) more for
granted."13 Jarrell's casual remark locates a profound difference in
voice which helps to explain apparently minor differences of aesthetic
judgment-word choice, rhythm and phrasing. In Moore, a tone of
indictment and superior irony, an inclination to pick and choose, com-
bines with a fundamental optimism about the ties between morality and
aesthetics, and about the triumph of the imagination over an imperfect
world. Her intricate surfaces and her daunting intelligence give her
world a strained redemptiveness. Moore culls usable bits and fragments
from the flux of things, to construct a dazzling, highly idiosyncratic and
independent reality. Bishop, a disarmed traveler rather than a collec-
tor, pursues an elusive image of stability, with less confidence about the
self-protective value of art: "Less idiosyncratic, and less magnificent," in
Lowell's words, she is also "softer, dreamier, more human and more
personal" unlike the armored Moore.14 A philosophical and moral

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 MOORE AND ELIZABETH BISHOP

gloom characterizes her excursive vision. She is more impresse

mess of life than by its neatness of finish.
These differences emerge in a comparison of Moore's "The
Steeple Jack" (CP, p. 5-7) and Bishop's "Little Exercise" (CP, p. 47),
both poems depicting seaside scenes from several perspectives. Both
poems suggest danger glimpsed and contained. They both include
interpretive metaphor and self-conscious pictorial ordering. And yet
Moore, even with her irony, invests much more confidence in her
elegant surface than Bishop does in her simple one. The world Moore
entertains is safe despite its fallibility; Bishop's world is less comfortably
balanced, less decorative and less pastoral.
Moore's poem depicts elements dangerous elsewhere but tamed
and aestheticized in this holiday world. She describes, to use William
Empson's concept of pastoral, a partial world as if it were a whole
world. For "exotic serpent life" there is the "diffident little newt," "cats,
not cobras, to/ keep down the rats." Even the storm is part of the local
color, a "whirlwind fife-and-drum" which, though it "bends the salt
marsh grass" and "disturbs stars in the sky and the / star on the steeple"
still evokes pleasure: "it is a privilege to see so/ much confusion." There
is a certain mockery of this tourist response to flux, but even positive
figures in the poem share the view. "Diirer would have seen a reason
for living/ in a town like this." To him "eight stranded whales" are
objects of aesthetic contemplation, not pity. One is secure in one's point
of view. Every danger, every negative element is counterbalanced or
even dismissed within an overriding pictorialism. Moore does not sug-
gest that this is reality, but that it is a possible way of experiencing
reality. "Disguised by what/ might seem the opposite, the sea-/side
flowers and trees are favored by the fog." While Moore admits the
place is formed in the eyes of its beholders, she never disparages such
aestheticizing. Each character might be "part of a novel," and each
character finds a "home" in this place. The old puritan town is far from
upright, its steeple (based on one in Brooklyn) is "not true," and the
steeple jack, dressed in devil's red, looks for all the world like Jonathan
Edwards' spider. Nevertheless, he is "placing danger signs by the
church/ while he is gilding the solid-/ pointed star, which on a steeple/
stands for hope." Hope and imagination always successfully counter-
balance evil in Moore.
While Moore's last word is hope, Bishop's is "disturbed" and an
atmosphere of disturbance dominates "Little Exercise." No major hur-
ricanes shake this Florida scene, but a general agitation pervades t
poem. Metaphor tends to draw out the latent danger. The storm

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

"roaming the sky uneasily like a dog looking for a place to

and the little palm trees are "suddenly revealed/ as fistfu
fish-skeletons." The pictorializing is more cinematic, the poin
moving, so that the repeated imperative to "think" does no
secure point of view. Neither the reassuring guide nor amused
directs our sight. If the storm looks like a stage set from afar,
of small, badly lit battle-scenes," this does not make its effects
The last scene is the most telling in this respect.
Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boa
tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge;
think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.
The figure in the boat is a kind of surrogate for the reade
being asked to "think" of him is asked in a sense to identify w
but with the weight of superior knowledge. While "someone"
the boat we remain apprehensive, aware of the dangers jus
for his hold is precarious, he is "tied to a mangrove root or th
a bridge" and while he is "uninjured" the suggestion of injury
in "barely disturbed." While Moore concludes by restoring bal
asserting that her town "could not be dangerous" (however
she may mean this), Bishop closes in an atmosphere of imbalan
little exercise has no confident moral; instead, it shakes the co
implied in an authorial stance.
Bishop's tribute to Moore, "Invitation to Miss Marianne
(CP, p. 82-83), tells us much about the relationship between th
poets. Moore delighted in the piece and undoubtedly recogn
self in its flourish of detail (August 24, 1948): "Your mag
every word a living wonder-with an enfoldment that does not
back of itself, and the colors!"
The gesture of invitation rather than challenge or homage is itself
significant in relation to an earlier poet, suggesting camaraderie above
rivalry. This is also an invocation, an acknowledgment of lack and a
call for support. Indeed, Moore becomes a kind of aerial spirit, bring-
ing lightness into a drab world. The poem begins by readying the world
for the visit. The ordinary world is metamorphosed in expectation,
anticipating a poetic presence:
Enter: two rivers, gracefully bearing
countless little pellucid jellies
in cut-glass epergnes dragging with silver chains.
Moore herself appears oxymoronically as a good witch or necessary
angel, at once gracing the world with imaginative glitter and casting a
moral eye upon its stains. She has a "slight censorious frown and blue

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 MOORE AND ELIZABETH BISHOP

ribbons," wears an austere black cape "full of butterf

bon-mots." Such Mozartian conjunctions of light and
Moore's aesthetic. Bishop admires her ability to see the wo
without being crushed by it, admires her "natural heroism
she can hear a higher music and connect the good with th
Mounting the sky with natural heroism,
above the accidents, above the malignant movies,
the taxicabs and injustices at large,
while horns are resounding in your beautiful ears
that simultaneously listen to
a soft uninvented music, fit for the musk deer.
Moore's art tames the brute world and raises it out of lassitude: the
lions outside the library follow her through the doors to the reading
rooms, the grim museums "behave like courteous male bower-birds."
But Bishop seems less confident about what ultimate impact such a
"daytime comet" will have on the world. When she offers her invited
guest various entertainments, they seem incommensurate with the plea-
sure of her company:
We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping,
or play at a game of constantly being wrong
with a priceless set of vocabularies,
or we can bravely deplore, but please
please come flying.
Is this Bishop's reminder about the limits of art? The options are not
as arbitrary as the list makes them sound. They describe the sadness of
the world, its consumerism, but also the pleasure Moore takes in pick-
ing and choosing. They describe Moore's relentless accuracy (which to
Bishop, as to Stevens, may have a tragic dimension), and they describe
Moore's courage.
Bishop manages to be similarly specific, in this apparently whimsi-
cal piece, about the techniques she admires in Moore, techniques which
facilitate her transformations. The "inaudible abacus" is of course
Moore's syllabic method, the "dynasties of negative constructions" th
double negatives which render positives and those ironic revers
Moore's poetry generates something indeed "unnebulous" (not yet ob-
vious), but still celestial. Out of her enchanting presence, Bishop agai
sees the corrupt world seething underneath compelling surfaces.
her skepticism never dampens her genuine appreciation for Moor
spirit-rather, it heightens the need for it. In a remark she made late
to Anne Stevenson (January 8, 1964) we can understand the place
this spirit:

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

My outlook is pessimistic. I think we are still barbarians

I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even gi
make life endurable and to keep ourselves "new, tender, qu
Though more often than not in different parts of the worl
affection of these two women for one another and for art sustained
their correspondence until Moore's death. As the older poet's ow
artistic energy naturally declined with her health, her admiration fo
the now mature Bishop, and her wish to be reunited with her, gr
stronger. Her penultimate letter to Bishop, in shaky handwriting, ex
presses this need: "Art seems to have desisted? I still want to paint-a
the fur on my bushy best paint brush eaten up by a moth.... Com
back!" (anuary 3, 1969).
Living such different lives as they did, these women in many wa
complemented one another. Bishop seems to have found in Marian
Moore a source of stability, vigorous enchantment, optimism, and de
cation to craft. Moore found in Bishop a source of vicarious adventur
and mystery, but was also drawn to her personal and artistic courage
and to the promised continuation of many of her own poetic values,
an entirely individual voice. As readers, we are fortunate in havi
both poets, the gentlewoman and the seeker, who together preserve
us the good, the true and the beautiful.
All previously unpublished material by Marianne Moore is printed with th
permission of Clive E. Driver, Literary Executor of the Estate of Marianne
Moore.

1 Letter from Marianne Moore to Elizabeth Bishop, June 21, 1959. Vassar
College. All other letters from Moore to Bishop noted in text.
2 Marianne Moore, Complete Poems (New York: Viking, 1981), p. 121. All
subsequent quotations cited in text.
3 Elizabeth Bishop, "Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore,"
The Collected Prose (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1984), p. 155.
4Ibid., p. 156.
5 Letter from Elizabeth Bishop to Anne Stevenson, October 2, 1963.
Washington University. All other letters from Bishop to Stevenson noted in
text.

6 Letter from Elizabeth Bishop to Marianne Moore, August 21, 1936. The
Rosenbach Foundation. All other letters from Bishop to Moore noted in text
7 Marianne Moore, "Archaically New" (1935), rpt. in Elizabeth Bishop and
Her Art, ed. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil Estess (Ann Arbor: The Univ. of
Michigan Press, 1983), p. 176.
8 Randall Jarrell, "The Poet and His Public," Partisan Reviewi, 13 (1946),
488.
v Robert Lowell, "Thomas, Bishop and Williams," Sewzanee Review, 55
(Summer 1947), 497.

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 MOORE AND ELIZABETH BISHOP

10 Elizabeth Bishop "As We Like It," Quarterly Review of Lit

(Spring, 1948), 129-35.
1 Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979 (New York
Straus and Giroux, 1983), p. 64. All subsequent quotations cited i
12 Marianne Moore, "A Modest Expert: North and South," (1946),
Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, p. 179.
13 Randall Jarrell, "The Poet and His Public," 488.
14 Robert Lowell, "Thomas, Bishop and Williams," 497.

This essay is a revised version of a paper presented to the M

"American Women Writers: Influence and Tradition," December,
another detailed discussion of the tone, style and progress of the Bish
correspondence see Lynn Keller, "Words Worth a Thousand Postcards: The
Bishop/Moore Correspondence," American Literature, 55 (Fall, 1983), pp. 405-
429, which appeared after this essay was accepted for publication.

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