BETWEEN THE LINESThe Letters Of Moore, Stevens, And Bishop
Kathleen Flenniken
Critical Paper and Program BibliographySubmitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA (Master ofFine Arts) in Creative Writing, Pacific Lutheran University, August 2007.
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Between the Lines: The Letters Of Moore, Stevens, And Bishop
INTRODUCTION
The successful poem stands on its own. No key is necessary to unlock a great
poem’s secrets, except perhaps a familiarity with the literature that preceded it. The best
voices in poetry are distinctive and point the reader’s attention toward art. Sometimes the
art is made of the poet’s own life, a stand-in for the human condition, but the reader
should not confuse the poem with biography.
And yet some readers yearn for biography, even—maybe especially—when the
poet’s work deflects personal attention. The 20th Century moderns, including Wallace
Stevens and Marianne Moore, wrote distinctively even as they buried the personal so
deeply as to render it unrecognizable. Elizabeth Bishop, who wrote a generation later
alongside her confessional peers, brought elements of biography into her poems, but
remotely, favoring most of her career a detached and bemused narrator. All the same,
biography can enrich our reading, even if it is not “necessary” to the poems. In the case
of Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop, the stature of their work and
reputations is so elevated as to be intimidating, even as their times and places sink into
the past. It becomes harder to imagine them as ordinary citizens of the world.
Biographies and the poets’ own letters provide a window into the their minds and their
cultural and historical frame, and offer a taste of the writers’ other, “real-life” voices.
Sometimes formal, sometimes unguarded, the best letters establish a pattern of thinking
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and rhythm and discovery that, at moments, rivals the poems, and offers up fresh insights
into the poet’s creative process. And Moore, Stevens, and Bishop all shared a
considerable talent—even a genius—for letter-writing. Marianne Moore’s letters reveal
that her quirky rhythms and subject matter are entirely organic. Stevens offers notes on
the construction of his poems and the philosophy behind his wildly imaginative work,
while revealing a little of the “necessary angel”—his life. In Bishop’s letters we discover
the depth of feeling behind her unblemished surfaces. It is easy to be captivated by their
correspondence, which for each of them was a lifeline—Moore because she adored the
art of letters, Stevens because, as a businessman, he had otherwise isolated himself from
the literary community, Bishop because for much of her life she lived thousands of miles
from her literary world.
MARIANNE MOORE
It is hard to overestimate the force of personality conveyed by Marianne Moore’s
personal and professional correspondence. The letters, which span the years 1905 –
1969, are perhaps as impressive as Moore’s poems for the way they reveal her curiosity,
playfulness, integrity, faith, and intelligence. The Moderns come to life here. The poets’
relationships, one to another, become clearer. Most importantly, the voice behind
Moore’s poems is explained: Moore’s generosity of spirit and her personal warmth ride
between the lines of her poems, and might be missed without this glimpse into her
personal life.
Moore’s poems are distinctly hers, and distinctly odd—considered within any
frame of reference. They are a remarkable testament to Moore’s devotion to the world of
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things, natural and otherwise. She was in her poems as meticulous with her research
(evident in her characteristic quotation marks and copious endnotes) and metaphors as
any scientist. She seems never to have needed to reveal herself in her poems, but acted
instead as an eye—a keenly focused eye attached to a big brain. Just as remarkable was
her allegiance to her own music, which is unlike anyone else’s, and must have had an
extraordinary effect in her first appearances in print. It is the music which controls the
poems, which stirs “the facts” into surrealistic clouds. Elizabeth Bishop wrote of Moore
in a letter, “I think her own sense of rhythm is so peculiar to her, so much a part of her
respiration, heartbeats, etc., that even when she thinks she’s writing something in a
regular tum-tum-tum style she isn’t at all” (Bishop Letters 158). Both strengths stem
from an abiding self knowledge; both (warp and weft) create a voice that is inimitable.
Marianne Moore established her distinct rhythm and style in her earliest
publications, in poems like “The Fish,” published first in 1918 at age 31. The syllabic
form Moore often employed draws attention to itself in a series of stanzas with lines
ranging from one to nine syllables. The short lines and the rhyme scheme create a
charming bobbing effect, like waves. “[W]ade / through black jade” (Moore Poems 1-2)
and “an / injured fan” (5-6) and especially “ac- / cident—lack” (31-32) are amusing, and
let the reader in on the secret of her construction. The poem’s bones are as appealing as
its heart, its eye as intriguing as what it sees. Another early poem is one of her most
famous—“Poetry.” Though she later trimmed it down to its first three lines (to the
dismay of many readers), it is the five-stanza version that still gets quoted in endless
essays. “Poetry” is a testament to Marianne Moore’s singular ability to observe the world
through her jeweler’s loupe and arrange her accumulated data into a lively, engaging
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poem. The words are still fresh: “I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important
beyond all this fiddle. / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers
in / it, after all, a place for the genuine” (1-3). It is easy to overlook how innovative, even
radical, the poem must have been in 1919—half nature newsreel, half lecture. It is
interesting to remember that Moore resisted calling her early work poetry, but decided to
call it that for lack of any better term. Moore’s later work in Selected Poems, What Are
Years and Nevertheless achieves a mysterious luster. A voice addresses its subjects in a
manner that is nearly religious in its attention, without sentiment. She is able, in poems
like “The Mind is an Enchanting Thing,” and “The Frigate Pelican,” to combine
elements of nature, memory, and mystery, to make poems that want to be read again and
again, which never quite come easily but reward the reader further with each reading.
Moore’s idiosyncratic interests and her avid eye are everywhere in her letters and
might be pointed out at random. As early as 1910 when she was working as a
stenographer, Moore (age 23) wrote to her favorite confidants, brother John Werner
Moore and mother Mary Warner Moore, of a stray yellow cat that she quite
spontaneously chose to dissect in her rented room.
I put the cat in my room, did some errands at Forest Hill, got Miss
Seymour to let me off when I should have done my necessary work. I
took an hour first to get a box from Cedars and the chloroform and go
home, put the cat in the box, a comfort over it, and table on top and then
rushed back. I had a letter (10 carbon copies of each sheet) to write for
Mr. Dewey and that took me till a quarter of six. I was in despair. But I
got Mr. Graham’s instruments and beat it. The cat was dead. I threw the
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things off my table and bed. Set the table on the floor, tied the pussy to
the table spreading the paws, made an anterior and a posterior transverse
cut and a longitudinal, dissected one leg thoroughly. I saw what I wanted
to know apropos of Maxy’s leg [Max was a lame dog owned by the
Moores], location of arteries, etc. Took out heart and lungs and examined
ribs. I then[…] borrowed an iron coal shovel, dug a hole down the slope
from Iroquois Tower and buried the cat. As I was digging moiling and
rooting, clinking against stones and tearing roots, Mr. West came along
and his wife. He said, “Digging for treasure?” I said “no, I’m digging a
grave. It looks like the opening chapter to a Maurice Hewlett story
doesn’t it?” They lamented the cat and Mr. West said, “I took a picture of
her this morning. I’ll show it to you if it comes out.” Two men came
along and also inquired at a distance what I was doing. One is a young
fellow, manufacturer or something. He said, “I wish I’d known you were
doing it, (dissecting) and I’d have helped you. I like to do that sort of
thing.” People are all fine to me. I am spoiled to death. (Moore Letters
84)
From a letter written July 19, 1932, to her brother, she described her trip to the
Natural History Museum to uncover information about her latest subject, the jerboa. This
passage is extracted from many, many pages of description of the various museum
displays:
On the way down-stairs I paused among the Audubon souvenirs and
original drawings. They are tiered on a three-story wall surrounding the
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stairs; some were under yellow glass, and all shades were drawn down, so
seeing was to some extent, a matter of belief. The prairie dogs fared the
worst, being the highest. But a flock of birds among what seemed to [be]
peach-leaves, was a very notable piece of detail; also a small spotted bird,
standing a little pigeon-toed with a waiting expression, and a raccoon on a
branch, against an unfinished squared white background—a masterpiece
of liveliness and texture, every guard hair and claw depicted, and the body
color suggested by grayish brown water-color. Also there was a pink-
footed tern of some kind, and some handwriting. I hastened home; but of
course had telephoned Mouse [her mother] that I was “delayed.” (272)
Moore became famous among friends for her thank you letters. “The
handkerchiefs almost frighten us by their perfection" she writes. “Even a bungler must
see that maintained rectangles in drawn-work so tenuous and complicated, required
genius and many years' apprenticeship; and the fineness of the material is to begin with a
constant wonder" (302). The thank you letters may explain why so many friends and
acquaintances went out of their way to shower Moore with gifts. Many of the letters read
like studies for her poems.
The letters chronicle the Modern poetry movement, her friendships with William
Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, H. D., Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth
Bishop and many other literary figures of the 20th century, sometimes with disarming
details.
At the tea-party when Gilbert [Seldes] said, “Miss Moore, I have every
letter you ever wrote to me.” And then patronizingly to T. S. Eliot, “Miss
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Moore’s letters are very remarkable,” T. S. said, “Your letters to editors
are very terse.” & I said, “So are yours,” whereat there was loud laughter
as if I was Ed Wynn. And also when Ed. Wilson offered me milk—T. S.
Eliot having poured a portion of it into his tea, I said—after
refusing—“You’re very humane.” The conversation was trivial and
discreditable but I don’t know how a fellow was to talk to T. S. E. about
[George] Herbert and Bishop [Lancelot] Andrewes (Gilbert and Mrs.
Seldes and Mr. Wilson and a timid stranger sitting by, with much news of
Shankar the Hindoo dancer and a drummer whose drums were disguised
about the room as cocoanuts and cockatoos, etc.). The stranger said not a
word but would smile faintly now and then. (308)
The letters reveal Moore’s ambition, her warmth, her eccentric humor, her
generosity, and her incredibly close relationship with her mother (whom she lived with
until her mother’s death when Moore was 59) and brother. The letters she wrote to
Warner over her lifetime document her brilliant attention to the world of everyday objects
and relationships, along with her religious faith, her politics (Republican), and her view
of herself. In her college letters, Moore often referred to herself in the third person as
“he” (as did her family). Moore’s later life with her mother unfolded not as duty but as
pleasure. She said once to Ezra Pound, "I am cautious about encouraging visitors who
[…] might bore my mother. She is over the heads of most of them" (277). In fact, the
intimacy shared by Moore, her mother, and her brother, revealed in these letters, explains
in good part her self-confidence in an age before suffrage, her completeness in an age of
marriage, her bravery in a modern age of poetry.
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While a great writer’s best poems stay with us, timeless, the context of those
poems—the cultural and social mores—may not be retained. The poems must survive
that stripping down. While Moore’s poems generally do, it is easy to mistake her
passions for mannerism, elaborate subterfuge, avoidance, especially in our post post-
confessional world. Why would Moore write of plumet basilisks or jerboas unless it
were to mask her life? To delicately skirt the fact she was abandoned by her father as a
baby, or any number of “real” reasons for the poems? Surely the passion must come
from some psycho- or sociological source, or so the modern reader has been taught to
conclude. It becomes clear in Marianne Moore’s letters that her dedication to things, to
fish and birds and the glaciers on Rainier, to precision, was an end in itself. As Kay Ryan
notes, “Moore's letters reveal how literal her poems are, how of a piece with her life” (2).
It turns out Moore’s poems are not only not mannered or artificial, they are intrinsically
hers.
WALLACE STEVENS
Wallace Stevens said that “The Necessary Angel is not the imagination but
reality” (852). It is the real that brings emotional depth to Stevens’s poetry, though it
may be nearly impossible to disentangle from the imaginative matrix of his poems. “I
placed a jar in Tennessee,” he writes in “Anecdote of the Jar,” “And round it was, upon a
hill. / It made the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill. // The wilderness rose up to it,
/ And sprawled around, no longer wild. / The jar…took dominion everywhere” (Stevens
Poems 1-7, 9). A wild imagination invented this image, circa 1919; a wild imagination it
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described. Stevens’s poems are made of wilderness with a core of reality “gray and bare”
(10) that does not “give of bird or bush” (11). The details of his life are tangled
inextricably with the fantastic in his poems; curious readers turn to his letters for cues,
clues.
Stevens didn’t live completely inside the poetry community or the insurance
industry, or even the Hartford neighborhood where he walked between home and work.
This was intentional. Stevens restricted his social and professional interactions, and his
traveling, in order to protect his reading, thinking, and writing time. Thus Stevens’s
letters take on special importance; they contain what were for stretches of weeks,
sometimes months, his only literary conversations. They reveal not just his well-polished
theories but also his nascent ones, his affection for his friends, his tastes and opinions.
I am at work on a thing called An Ordinary Evening in New Haven. This
is confidential and I don’t want the thing to be spoken of. But here my
interest is to try to get as close to the ordinary, the commonplace and the
ugly as it is possible for a poet to get. It is not a question of grim reality
but of plain reality. The object is of course to purge oneself of anything
false. (636 )
It interests me immensely to have you speak of so many places that have
been merely names for me. Yet really they have always been a good deal
more than names. I practically lived in France when old Mr. Vidal was
alive because if I had asked him to procure from an obscure fromagerie in
the country some of the cheese with raisins in it of which I read one time,
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he would have done it and that is almost what living in France or
anywhere else amounts to. (610)
In the long run, as Poe said in one of his essays which nobody reads, the
generous man comes to be regarded as the stingy man; the beautiful
woman comes to be regarded as an old witch; the scholar becomes the
ignoramus. The hell with all this. For my own part I like to live in a
classic atmosphere, full of my own gods and to be true to them until I have
some better authority than a merely contrary opinion for not being true to
them. We have all to learn to hold fast. (558 )
The letters, edited by Stevens’s only daughter Holly, include many of his
courtship letters to Elsie Moll in 1904-1909, which become more fascinating in
retrospect, as a wedge into and counterpoint to their very private, seemingly unfulfilling,
but stable married life. The letters cover his early publishing relationship with Harriet
Moore, his trips to Key West and mainland Florida in the 1920s, his publication of
Harmonium. But beginning in the 1930s, when Stevens returned to poetry after a several
year absence and developed a devoted if small audience, the letters provide background
and sometimes basic explanations of his poems and philosophy. It is in this period and
until his death that Stevens developed some important friendships through letters, many
of them overseas, and many of them with fellow writers who became sounding boards for
Stevens as he worked out his philosophies of Imagination and Reality, Words and Ideas,
Order and Poetry. These letters also demonstrate his sense of humor, his humanity, and
his capacity for affection.
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In letters to his publishers, translators, and ersatz biographers, Stevens would
submit himself to questions and probing and discuss earnestly (if briefly) his poetic
intent. “I have the greatest dislike for explanations. As soon as people are perfectly sure
of a poem they are just as likely as not to have no further interest in it; it loses whatever
potency it had” (294). Nevertheless, he offered opinions and interpretations of specific
poems. “I think I should select from my poems as my favorite the Emperor of Ice Cream.
This wears a deliberately commonplace costume, and yet seems to me to contain
something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it” (263).
In the second verse of The Emperor [of Ice Cream], the word fantails does
not mean fans, but fantail pigeons, so that motifs en eventail should be
motifs en pigeon paon. Going back to the first verse, the true sense of Let
be be the finale of seem is let being become the conclusion of denouement
of appearing to be: in short, ice cream is an absolute good. The poem is
obviously not about ice cream, but about being as distinguished from
seeming to be. (341)
[“The Man with the Blue Guitar”] deal[s] with the relation or balance
between imagined things and real things which, as you know, is a constant
source of trouble to me.[…] I have been trying to see the world about me
both as I see it and as it is. This means seeing the world as an imaginative
man sees it. (316)
There is a surprising degree of acquiescence in such letters. They seem to speak
as much as anything of Stevens’s isolation. He lamented to Harriet Moore,
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I do not expect to be in Chicago in the near future. The truth is that I have
not even been in New-York for more than two months. For that matter,
post-cards indicate that everybody I know is in Europe.[…] My royalties
[from Harmonium] for the first half of 1924 amounted to $6.70. I shall
have to charter a boat and take my friends around the world. (243)
Without sales or the attendant sustenance to his ego, living far from the self-
congratulatory halls of academia, far from the literary scenes of New York, London,
Paris, Stevens was alone in the staid, middle-class city of Hartford.
He spoke of his impulse to write. “[P]oetry must limit itself in respect to
intelligence. There is a point at which intelligence destroys poetry” (305). Stevens
defended his life as a poet and insurance executive. “The long and short of it is simply
that I deliberately took the sort of life that millions of people live, without embellishing it
except by the embellishments in which I was interested at the moment: words and
sounds” (294). While he was a respected and successful insurance lawyer, rising to the
level of vice president, and simultaneously regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th
century, he did not embrace nor was he embraced into either world during his life. There
is nothing in his letters to indicate he ever regretted his decision to live in both
worlds—that is, not wholly in either. There is no proof in his letters that he was
unhappily married, either. And yet it is poignantly evident in the solitary life his letters
and biographies describe.
In mid career, Stevens traveled deep into the abstract. While early poems are
bright with “things,” images, sensation, in later poems like “Esthetique Du Mal” Stevens
broods in a more philosophical manner, though often on the original themes found in his
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first book, Harmonium. “The greatest poverty is not to live / In a physical world, to feel
that one’s desire / Is too difficult to tell from despair.” (XV 1-3)
He disposes the world in categories, thus:The peopled and the unpeopled. In both, he isAlone. But in the peopled world, there is,Besides the people, his knowledge of them. InThe unpeopled, there is his knowledge of himself.Which is more desperate in the moments whenThe will demands that what he thinks be true?” (XII 1-7)
A Poem like “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” is a manifesto of sorts. “The poem goes
from the poet’s gibberish to / The gibberish of the vulgate and back again. / Does it move
to and fro or is it of both // At once?” (IX 1-4) It was in this period that Stevens wrote the
essays that comprise The Necessary Angel, his meditations on poetry, and one senses in
these poems and in Stevens’ letters that he was working out ideas for himself in a
deliberately philosophical manner.
Though Stevens has a towering reputation as a philosophizing poet, this
assessment breaks down somewhat under scrutiny. Paul Weiss, a philosopher, speaks of
Stevens as
a phenomenologist—that is, somebody who is alert to what he confronts
and gives it its full value, doesn’t reduce it by virtue of some preconceived
concept, but tries to accept things in their immediacy and their full
richness. This is of course what one looks to in a poet.[…] [H]is ultimate
passion was to try to get to the clean, clear ultimate reality, which required
thrust through everything that we are thinking, naming, using, saying.
What I’m not clear about is what he saw when he got there.[…] Say ‘The
Emperor of Ice-Cream’ is an insight into how some ordinary humdrum
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occurrence can stand out as a pivotal event in somebody’s life. In that
sense, he is somebody that a philosopher can read with pleasure and
understand, but when he begins to write in prose as if he were talking
technically about philosophy, he’s rather naïve. (Brazeau 213)
Similarly, though Stevens’s letters document his long-time devotion to visiting
galleries and museums, and collecting art through his personal dealer in Paris, his
collection of art and his writings about art were relatively unsophisticated. Monroe
Wheeler, of the Museum of Modern Art, invited Stevens to speak there about “The
Relations between Poetry and Painting.” Wheeler observed, “I discovered finally that he
didn’t know a great deal about painting; he really hadn’t the time to study it. He visited
the museums, there’s no doubt about that; he paid close attention, probably, to art
magazines, too.[…] He simply took pleasure [,…] he didn’t analyze” (Brazeau 190-
191). Acquaintances who managed entry into Stevens’ home complained of his
“established bourgeois taste” (Brazeau 201). His surroundings, even his beloved
paintings, were mostly conventional, no matter how striking and new his poetry might be.
And though most of his life Stevens resisted religion and its troubles, in his last weeks,
dying of cancer, he asked to be baptized by the attending priest into the Catholic Church,
and requested that a Saint Christopher medal be pinned to his pillow (Brazeau 295).
In the face of contradiction and complexity, of half-formed images of his life as a
businessman, husband, aesthete, philosopher, the letters enhance Stevens’s essential
mystery. His devotion to his career in the insurance industry speaks to the indelible mark
of the American work ethic. Stevens was obliged to be useful, industrious, to provide
well for his family, to be a creature of the “real” world. His life proved relatively
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ordinary—he was acquisitive, correct, conservative, bourgeois in every notable respect,
down to his successful career—with one exception: his giant poetic talent. The letters
document how far Stevens would go to protect it. He risked friendships and invited
loneliness in order to guard unbroken stretches of writing time. He denied himself trips
to Europe and the far East, despite his passionate interest in those places, so that he might
feed that desire (and the imagined worlds it evoked) to his poems. The letters and
biographies suggest that Stevens weathered—perhaps even encouraged—a cold marriage
to a reclusive woman in part because it gave him a legitimate excuse to withdraw into his
imagination. Considering Stevens’s Protestant, upper-middle class American sense of
propriety and duty, he may well have reasoned that this was the price of genius—that is,
that genius must come at great personal cost.
Fifty years of letters reveal the arc of Stevens’s life, from student to steady suitor
to revered poet, and the breadth of his life, from businessman to indulgent father to
Pulitzer Prize winner. His journey to recognition—which was small in his lifetime,
limited to an elite poetry audience—proved dignified and lonely. Costly. Stevens’s last
published poems are an exquisite expression of resignation, of his willingness to pay the
price. He speaks to the imagination he has protected and nurtured for a lifetime in “Final
Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”: “This is […] the intensest rendezvous” (Stevens
Poems 4).
Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.
Within its vital boundary, in the mind.We say God and the imagination are one…How high that highest candle lights the dark.
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Out of this same light, out of the central mind,We make a dwelling in the evening air,In which being there together is enough. (10-18)
The title, among all Stevens’s brilliant titles, is perhaps his most revealing. And
the tender way the speaker addresses his genius is deeply moving because, though it
comes so late in life, it describes a pure love. Stevens acknowledges the holy nature of
that final lighting of the “highest candle,” of “dwelling in the evening air” together with
the imagination. He anticipates death with a sweetness that recalls Richard Strauss’s
“Four Last Songs”—a sweetness untainted by reality, but also bearer of it. The letters
demonstrate how much Stevens paid to protect and control his imagination and its union
with reality, that “necessary angel,” in his poems.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
Elizabeth Bishop is celebrated for her masterly descriptions of landscape,
character and objects, for her attention to detail, for inventive and skillful use of form in
her free verse. She often used rhyme, sound and meter to control tone and mood and to
pace her disclosures. She was in her lifetime noted more for these strengths than for the
emotional revelations in her poems. This is changing, as more of her audience recognizes
the emotional surge behind her lush descriptions and tempered expression. “Discretion,”
Brett Millier calls it, and notes that she “invest[ed] what confession there was in her
poems deeply in objects and places, thus deflecting biographical inquiry” (Millier 242).
Robert Lowell said of Bishop’s poems that “the splendor and minuteness of her
descriptions soon seem wonderful. Later one realizes that her large, controlled and
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elaborate common sense is always or almost always absorbed in its subjects, and she is
one of the best craftsmen alive” (Quoted in Bishop Letters 146). This control is palpable
in “At the Fishhouses,” in which Bishop lays a full page of scene down before revealing
that the poem’s point of view is first person: “He was a friend of my grandfather”
(Bishop Poems 33) Until this moment she has carefully but anonymously led the eye to
the old man down by the fishhouses and set a silver scene: “The big fish tubs are
completely lined / with layers of beautiful herring scales / and wheelbarrows are similarly
plastered / with creamy iridescent coats of mail, / with small iridescent flies crawling on
them” (21-25). One can see the eyes on the flies. The cold, the gloaming, the trees and
blue-gray stones, all conspire to heighten the poem’s conclusion—that the sea would
“surely burn your tongue. / It is like what we imagine knowledge to be” (77-78).
Knowledge, then, makes us ache and burn, and is “derived from the rocky
breasts/forever, flowing and drawn, and since / our knowledge is historical, flowing, and
flown” (82-85). Historical, descending. It is no small thing that this is her grandfather’s
place. This pitiless scene is as close to her lost origins as Bishop gets. Though it’s not
essential to know that Bishop was an orphan passed around, “At the Fishhouses” deepens
into something darker and certainly lonelier with that knowledge.
In her later poems Bishop allowed herself certain biographical revelations. “One
Art,” which has been called one of the two or three best villanelles of the 20th century,
takes on loss as its subject. “I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or / next-to-
last, of three loved houses went. / The art of losing isn’t hard to master” (10-12). By any
measure it is a poignant poem. The fact that Bishop never saw her mother after age five,
that she never had a home until she lived with her long-time partner Lota Soares in
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Brazil, and that Soares took her own life—these facts are not necessary to understanding
the poem, but they add to its tragic power. “North Haven” is written in memoriam to
Robert Lowell and addresses him in a candid manner. “[T]he White-throated Sparrow’s
five-note song, / pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes. / […] You can’t derange,
or re-arrange, / your poems again. (But the Sparrows can their song.) / The words won’t
change again. Sad friend, you cannot change” (17-18, 28-30). The grief here isn’t naked,
it has been transformed. But it is plain in a way Bishop rarely permitted.
Elizabeth Bishop’s selected letters are very much about loss. Bishop, who lost
her mother and father and home as a young child—had to go looking for her life, finally
found it in middle-age, then lost it too easily: a life partner, a house, a country, the sense
that she belonged to someone and someplace. The letters chronicle 50 years of her life
from 1928, age 17, until her death in 1979. They document her relationship with her
poetry, with mentor Marianne Moore, peer Robert Lowell, and a large circle of friends.
They describe life in American cities as varied as New York, Key West, San Francisco,
and Boston, and in Brazil, the only real home she ever had, where she made a life with
Lota Soares until Lota’s suicide fifteen years later. And they reveal Bishop’s humor,
grace, and practical mind, along with the alcoholism she fought her entire adult life.
Bishop’s poems shielded her private life. She mostly stayed out of them, but
invested objects and places with her emotions—the only brand of confession she allowed
herself in her poetry. Her letters tell more, but because only one of her love letters to
Lota exists (found by accident tucked in a book), and because this collection does not
include letters to her other partners—Louise Crane, “XY” or Alice Methfessel—there is a
limit, rightly, to the revelations here. This is the Elizabeth she allowed her friends to see.
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She proved herself a most attractive and compelling friend. Her letters often focused on
the everyday—her garden, her cooking, the housekeepers’ babies, her cats, and her birds
(especially Sammy her Toucan). “Sammy is fine & can play catch with rounds of
banana—I am very mean and throw them too low so that he almost falls off his perch
trying to catch them and being overtoppled by his beak.[…] He’s […] always making
that sound you described as gourds being knocked together, meaning he’s pleased”
(Bishop Letters 244). “Now I know why poor children cry more than rich ones.
[…][I]t’s just because their parents are so dumb” (321). She wrote of adventures with
friends, funny and aggravating episodes with storekeepers and workmen, and moments
that might work their way into future poems. Of a very old black woman working for her
in Key West during WWII she wrote, “She was ironing and she said to me in between
solemn thumps, ‘We’ll have wars as long as people’s hearts is so hard’” (113). She had
a few friends she could confess to about her health problems—which were often alcohol
related. Her letters to Dr. Anny Baumann document her binges, her weight gains and
losses, her terrible bouts of asthma and its treatment, but even in these letters to her
doctor she manages this subject modestly. “I’m sorry to have gone on so about myself,
but I think perhaps you like to get reports on your patients once in a while” (327). She
sometimes spoke of how difficult it was to write—poems often came very slow to
her—and it is clear in her imaginative and colorful correspondence that letter-writing was
a kind of release.
One Art contains one letter not written by Elizabeth Bishop: It is the letter in
which Robert Lowell confesses how once he had wished to ask Bishop to marry him, for
a “Strachey and Virginia Woolf” kind of relationship (345). She did not respond for
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three months, and when she did, she sidestepped the matter. It is satisfying to speculate
on her thoughts. What is clear from their years of correspondence, from their easy way
with each other and their peer status, is her devotion to Lowell. She acknowledges late in
her life that she loved only Lota more (481).
There may be only one letter to Lota, but Lota inhabits these letters after 1952, the
year Bishop traveled to Brazil on a lark and stayed. What Elizabeth says after Lota’s
suicide in 1967 is many versions of this: “Lota and I were extremely happy together in
our own different ways—in fact I had 12 or 13 of the happiest years of my life with her,
until that park started to go bad and people behaved so badly—and that is more than most
people ever have, I think” (Bishop Letters 472 ). The park that “got bad” was the
government work that Lota took on in Rio that submerged her life. Bishop’s return to
Brazil to straighten Lota’s affairs turned disastrous—jealous friends and family destroyed
many of Bishop’s belongings, including her letters to Lota. She found they had turned
against her. The house—their pride, her only real home—was taken away. Bishop tried
living in Brazil again, in a second house she owned, Casa Mariana, but the locals turned
on her and her companion “XY” had a breakdown, further souring the place. In the
years that followed Lota’s death, Bishop lived in San Francisco, Cambridge, and Boston,
where she bought a home. She found companionship with Alice Methfessel. But it is
clear from her letters and poems thereafter that she was occupied by the past and all she
had lost.
Is it a mistake to read Elizabeth Bishop’s poems with a mind toward her
biography, her heartbreaking childhood, her struggles with depression and alcoholism
and personal loss, when she so clearly wanted to deflect that attention? It may not be the
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way she would have wanted the poems read, but it enhances their power, and it reveals
the emotional depth packed into every meticulous poem she published.
The Correspondence of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop
Bishop’s correspondence with Marianne Moore speaks volumes about their
friendship, and signals a more complex relationship than one might think from reading
Moore’s side alone. Moore in her letters was consistently solicitous, nineteenth century
in her mores, generous with support and advice. She was in her mid-forties at their first
meeting and an established (if not famous) literary figure. Bishop was twenty-three, and
just beginning. It is a little like watching the miracle of birth filmstrip to read Moore’s
early letters to Elizabeth Bishop, which begin in 1934 when Bishop was still a student at
Vassar, and to follow their correspondence through 1969. Moore has been described as
Bishop’s mentor, and the early letters are those of a mentor to a fine student. But even
early, there are references to lovely afternoons spent together, including trips to the circus
and Coney Island. Moore became friendly with Bishop’s friends, and Bishop with
Moore’s mother. The tenor and balance of the letters shifted with Elizabeth’s maturity.
Moore and Bishop became friends and peers, with Moore asking for Bishop’s opinions as
often as not. Bishop clearly enjoyed sending Moore exotic gifts and photographs in order
to extract Moore’s exuberant thank yous, which amounted to descriptions and flights of
fancy worthy of her poetry.
Much has been made of the fact it took four years for Moore to invite Bishop to
call her Marianne (Bishop Letters 76). This as much as anything signals the difference in
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their generations. For as forward and experimental as Moore’s poems were, she was old
fashioned (and eccentric) in her habits and social tastes. Bishop always accommodated
Moore, and her early letters are clearly admiring and, with time, full of expressed
affection. There is no doubt Bishop loved Moore and felt gratitude to her. But
simultaneously, she couldn’t help tell tales about Moore to friends. “We considered
taking a drawing room together, but probably it is just as well[…]. She insisted on
bringing ‘our food,’ in the old-fashioned way, and I had a canary with me & I’m afraid
we’d have both been nervous wrecks” (158). “Apparently [Marianne] is having
difficulties with her hostesses because they refuse to let her mow the lawn” (160). “M.
keeps wintergreen leaves in her room to chew & okra tablets. I said, ‘Are they green?’
“No, Elizabeth. They are fawn color.’ That was that” (170). “Marianne thinks [“Burglar
of Babylon”] my ‘best’—but I’m afraid that’s because she approves of the moral” (431).
Bishop worried as they aged about Moore’s sanity. After the shocking death of Dylan
Thomas she wrote, “Marianne […] hangs on just by the skin of her teeth and the most
elaborate paranoia I’ve ever heard of” (277). And later, “Meticulous attention, a method
of escaping from intolerable pain […][is] something I’ve just begun to realize
myself—although I did take it in about Marianne Moore long ago. (It is her way of
controlling what almost amounts to paranoia, I believe—although I handle these words
ineptly)” (477).
The rising sun of one poet and the setting of the other may have complicated the
relationship for Bishop. “I was glad to see […][a] reply to that silly review of Marianne
Moore by Karl Shapiro. It seemed completely uncalled-for to me. To be able to produce
something as good as her St. Jerome poem at the age of 72 should be enough, I think”
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(378). “I want to […] write up all my recollections of her over […]the 1930’s & 1940’s
[…]when she was at her best” (462). And perhaps she worried about her own future,
alone, as she watched Moore age. Very soon after Lota’s suicide she wrote to Moore, “I
do hope you are well and please don’t overdo, and please eat lots and lots of nourishing
food, and call dear Dr. Anny at the slightest cough, won’t you?—It was so nice of you to
come over that day and I shall never forget it” (476).
CONCLUSION
The great poems withstand changing mores and the loss of cultural and historical
references. Poems like “The Mind is an Enchanting Thing,” “No Swan So Fine,” “The
Snow Man,” “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” “Sestina,” and “One Art”
survive because they speak to what is most human in us, and are inviolable. It is only
human to wish to know the context of the poems and the voice and life of the poet, even
when the poems divert our attention away from biography. And the poems of Marianne
Moore, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop in particular resist easy embrace. They
are on first reading as cool as they are distinctive. Moore is odd, Stevens abstract, Bishop
removed. By contrast, the poets’ letters invite us to immerse ourselves in their artistic
and social concerns, the backstage chatter, the passions and pageants and ordinary details
of their lives. Who can deny that most readers embrace the familiar over the unfamiliar?
Even a master work of poetry—self-contained, outside of time and circumstance—can
make a deeper, more personal mark on the reader who is aware of time and circumstance.
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One compelling characteristic of the letter is that it is addressed to “you,” the
reader, intended recipient or not. The reader is the beneficiary of news freshly observed,
and travels back to the immediate present—Long Key, 1922, plunging into the morning
surf in pajamas, or New York City, 1933, wearing a dress with a cod-liver oil spot on the
occasion of meeting W. B. Yeats, or Brazil, 1956, winding up mountain roads in an MG
purchased with New Yorker money. The advantage and magic of reading letters is that
neither time nor interpreter intervenes, nothing distances the poet but the poet himself or
herself. It is the nearest thing to meeting. The span of these letters—50, even 60
years—provides us a lifetime of these moments, of friendships, loves, obsessions that
wax and wane, of character flaws, ordinary joys and sorrows. They are inherently
dramatic, and assuming the letter writer has any compelling qualities (and certainly
Moore, Stevens, and Bishop do in abundance), they invite affection and sympathy, and
form a basis for connection.
Why should a reader require any connection to a poet? Some of us seem to go
looking for it. Some of us approach new poetry with prejudice, envy, or suspicion that
must be overcome. Perhaps we are inclined to favor easy poems of shared experience.
Perhaps we attend readings because we need to match the poems to the poets’ voices, or
we stumble upon new poets in magazines, and invite them in only by counting them as
our own “discoveries.” Connections break down our natural resistance to the unfamiliar,
subvert our inclination to distrust the outsider, to see the world—even the world of
poetry—as “them” versus “us.” There are poets like Stevens, Moore, and Bishop, who
bear the burden of enormous reputation. It distances them. Their residence in the past
distances them. The cool surfaces of their poems distances them. Their obfuscation of
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the personal distances them. Their poems’ complexity distances them. It can be easier to
resist Stevens, easier to put off reading Bishop, easier to discount Moore as an artifact of
her age, than to do the work of reading them without prejudice, to put aside resentments
of all poets considered “canonical,” or feelings of intimidation. When poets die and grow
famous, they rescind their claims to have been human once, and it is easier to dismiss
them as irrelevant, cold. Ah, but the letters bring the poets alive again. A reader begins to
lower her guard.
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WORKS CITED
Bishop, Elizabeth, The Collected Poems, 1927-1979. New York: Noonday Press, 1979.
---. One Art: Letters, Selected and Edited by Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar Straus
Giroux, 1994.
Brazeau, Peter, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, An Oral Biography.
New York: Random House, 1977.
Millier, Brett, “Elusive Mastery: The Drafts of Elizabeth Bishop's ‘One Art.’”
Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender. Ed. Marilyn May Lombardi.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. 233-246.
Moore, Marianne, The Poems of Marianne Moore. Ed. Grace Schulman.
New York: Viking, 2003.
---. The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore. Ed. Bonnie Costello, Celeste
Goodridge, and Cristanne Miller. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
Ryan, Kay. “The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore.” Boston Review, Summer 1998
<http://bostonreview.net/BR23.3/ryan.html>.
Stevens, Wallace, The Collected Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954.
---. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1966.
