Elizabeth Bishop on Meeting Marianne Moore

I have always been fascinated by the manner in which older and established poets or artists have served as mentors for those just beginning to learn their craft. In recent decades, many of those relationships have developed in the formal setting of the university creative writing programs, places where students choose to be guided by authors on the faculty. I know I have been grateful for the counsel I received as a beginning poet from a few faculty members I regarded as mentors. Indeed, I believe any comprehensive examination of influences in American poetry during the last half of a century would need to explore the inspiration and instruction offered by mentors to their writing students in academic programs, especially with the increased presence of creative writing workshops on campuses across the country and the more structured network of such programs as evidenced by the expansion of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) in the past couple of decades. Nevertheless, one will find a number of prominent poets who also discovered mentors or role models for their writing from associations established outside the classroom.

I was reminded of this as I prepared for classes in the upcoming week, during which students in my Twentieth Century Poetry course and I will discuss the poems of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. We also will consider Bishop’s admiration for Moore, as well as Moore’s advice to Bishop. In fact, only Robert Lowell’s later friendship with Bishop matched her ongoing ties to Moore. [Visitors are urged to read “Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetic Voice: Reconciling Influences” for more on this topic.]

Elizabeth Bishop first met Marianne Moore in 1934 when a librarian at Vassar College, which Bishop attended as a student, arranged a meeting between the two near the reading room at the New York Public Library. Bishop later wrote an essay outlining her friendship with Moore, which began on that afternoon in 1934 and continued until Moore’s death in 1972, at the age of 84. That article, “Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore,” initially appeared in a 1983 issue of Vanity Fair, four years after Bishop’s death, and the piece is included in Elizabeth Bishop: The Collected Prose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984). A wonderful section of Bishop’s essay about her friendship with Moore describes the introduction to one another, on a bench in New York City, and an opening conversation that included a rather unusual invitation, which began a treasured lengthy association for the two poets:

I was very frightened, but I put on my new spring suit and took the train to New York. I had never seen a picture of Miss Moore: all I knew was that she had red hair and usually wore a wide-brimmed hat. I expected the hair to be bright red and for her to be tall and intimidating. I was right on time, even a bit early, but she was there before me (no matter how early one arrived, Marianne was always there first) and, I saw at once, not very tall and not in the least bit intimidating. She was forty-seven, an age that seemed old to me then, and her hair was mixed with white to a faint rust pink, and her rust-pink eyebrows were frosted with white. The large black flat hat was as I’d expected it to be. She wore a blue tweed suit that day and, as she usually did then, a man’s “polo shirt,” as they were called, with a black bow at the neck. The effect was quaint, vaguely Bryn Mawr 1909, but stylish at the same time. I sat down and she began to talk.

It seems to me that Marianne talked to me steadily for the next thirty-five years, but of course that is nonsensical. I was living far from New York many of those years and saw her at long intervals. She must have been one of the world’s greatest talkers: entertaining, enlightening, fascinating, and memorable; her talk, like her poetry, was quite different from anyone else’s in the world. I don’t know what she talked about at that first meeting; I wish I had kept a diary. Happily ignorant of the poor Vassar girls before me who hadn’t passed muster, I began to feel less nervous and even spoke some myself. I had what may have been an inspiration, I don’t know—at any rate, I attribute my great good fortune in having known Marianne as a friend in part to it. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus was making a spring visit to New York and I asked Miss Moore (we called each other “Miss” for over two years) if she would care to go to the circus with me the Saturday after next. I didn’t know that she always went to the circus, wouldn’t have missed it for anything, and when she accepted, I went back to Poughkeepsie in the grimy day coach extremely happy.