Volume 44, Number 9 · May 29, 1997
Lady Lazarus
By James Fenton
Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath—Bryn Mawr class of 1909, Vassar class of 1934, Smith class of 1955—educated women of three generations who achieved preeminence as poets. That sounds like a circumlocution. It is a circumlocution, but I feel I would betray the spirit of Moore and Bishop by calling them women poets. Moore was a feminist, a suffragette, a Woman Who Did.[1] Although it appears that marriage was never one of her ambitions, as it happened she made the sacrifice or renunciation common among the women of her time who had a vocation. She was drawn to the avant-garde, to modernism in the making, and if her creations are strikingly impersonal (so that even a poem purportedly about her father turns out to be a fiction), that impersonality is not untypical of modernism. Utterly original, she was at once recognizable as a fellow spirit and equal among the likes of Pound, Eliot, Stevens, and Williams.
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