Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore (November 15, 1887 - February 6, 1972) was one of the leading US poets of the 20th Century. She was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, but from age 8 to 28 she lived in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She grew up here, considered Carlisle and Cumberland Valley her home place, received her early education here, and was shaped in a permanent way by her friends and mentors here. She went to Bryn Mawr College because of the talented daughters of her pastor at Second Presbyterian Church, three of four of whom went to Bryn Mawr. (Your loss, Dickinson College.) After college she received a trade education here from Carlisle Commercial College, which enabled her to get her first job at the Indian Industrial School at Carlisle Barracks. She formed the vision of becoming a writer, a poet, here, and she published her first poems while in Carlisle. She nurtured lifelong friendships here. Indeed, her distinctive poetic style was influenced by the particular style of the sermons of her pastor at church, Rev. George Norcross. She is the only Carlislilian, other than Jim Thorpe (whom she taught), as far as I know, who has appeared on a postal stamp (1990 -- Thorpe appeared in 1984).
I include associated writers here, because Marianne was a skilled and generous networker from her youth. She had a gift for friendship, a diverse range within and beyond the literary world. She had passionate interests in many things, from baseball to art, from animals to music. All her interests, sooner or later, show up in her poetry, her essays, and her wonderful letters. She drew friends into her deep regard for the world, and many of her friends held a similar conversation with the world.
Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop
Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop
An illuminating new biography of one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Bishop
"Love Unknown points movingly to the many relationships that moored Bishop, keeping her together even as life—and her own self-destructive tendencies—threatened to split her apart.” —The Wall Street Journal
Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that "Elizabeth had more talent for life—and for poetry—than anyone else I've known." This new biography reveals just how she learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters—a remarkable body of work that would make her one of America's most beloved and celebrated poets. In Love Unknown, Thomas Travisano, founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, tells the story of the famous poet and traveler's life.
Bishop moved through extraordinary mid-twentieth century worlds with relationships among an extensive international array of literati, visual artists, musicians, scholars, and politicians—along with a cosmopolitan gay underground that was then nearly invisible to the dominant culture. Drawing on fresh interviews and newly discovered manuscript materials, Travisano illuminates that the "art of losing" that Bishop celebrated with such poignant irony in her poem, "One Art," perhaps her most famous, was linked in equal part to an "art of finding," that Bishop's art and life was devoted to the sort of encounters and epiphanies that so often appear in her work.