What Fanny Borden Did
In March 1934, a Vassar College librarian named Fanny Borden wrote to Marianne Moore on behalf of a graduating senior who had been reading Moore’s 1924 collection Observations with enough attention to ask questions about it. Borden and Moore had known each other since childhood. She had tried this kind of introduction before, pairing Moore with other Vassar students who showed promise, and most of those meetings had produced nothing. Moore, who had been disappointed enough times to know the odds, agreed with some reluctance.
The meeting took place on a bench outside the main reading room of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. Elizabeth Bishop was 23 years old. Moore was 46.
The Weight of the Name
By that March, Moore carried a specific and already-documented reputation, not simply a general one. She had first published in 1915, placing poems in The Egoist, a London-based literary magazine, and in Poetry, the Chicago journal founded by Harriet Monroe. Her first book, Poems (1921), had been published in London by the Egoist Press, an arrangement made by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) without Moore’s prior knowledge. Observations (1924) had won the Dial Award.
From 1925 until the magazine folded in 1929, she had served as acting editor of The Dial, though some sources distinguish an initial “acting editor” phase from a fuller “editor” designation from 1926 onward, which was at that point the most prominent American literary journal of the modernist period. During those four years she published no poems of her own. A new collection, Selected Poems, with an introduction by T.S. Eliot, was due out in 1935.
For a 23-year-old trying to work out how to be a poet, meeting Moore was not like meeting a successful writer in the abstract. It was meeting someone whose aesthetic choices were already argued over in print: poems that drew their material from zoology, baseball, and circus life rather than from the conventional lyric subjects that still dominated popular verse.
The Senior Who Had Stalled
Bishop had arrived at Vassar in the fall of 1929 intending to major in music, but performance anxiety pushed her toward English. By 1933 she had co-founded Con Spirito, a student literary magazine, with Mary McCarthy and others. Outside Vassar she had no publication record to speak of, and by her own later account she was insecure and creatively stuck. Her mother, institutionalized since 1916, died in May 1934, the same month Bishop graduated.
Moore had no professional obligation to invest time in someone she had never met. There was every reason for the library bench meeting to be courteous and short and leave no mark on either woman’s work.
Bishop’s Invitation, Moore’s Ritual
It was Bishop, not Moore, who moved the encounter forward. She invited Moore to the circus. She did not know, at the time, that Moore attended the circus every year, treating it as both personal pleasure and a source of artistic material: animals, their movement and particularity, fed directly into her poems.
Moore accepted. The two went to Madison Square Garden in New York City. Moore brought two large paper bags of stale brown bread to feed the elephants. She also arrived with a specific practical objective. Her brother, John Warner Moore, had given her an elephant-hair bracelet, two or three strands of black hairs held together with gold clasps, and one of the hairs had broken. Elephant hairs grow only on the tops of the heads of very young elephants. Moore intended to repair the bracelet on the spot.
Bishop fed bread to the adult elephants as a distraction while Moore used nail scissors to cut hairs from the head of a baby elephant. Both women came home with material. Both incorporated elements of the visit into their writing, though the surviving record does not specify which poems drew directly from the experience.
The Shape of What Followed
The friendship that began on a library bench in March 1934 lasted until Moore’s death on February 5, 1972, a span of approximately 38 years. Moore sent Bishop more than 200 letters over that period. For at least the first two years the two addressed each other formally as “Miss Moore” and “Miss Bishop.”
Moore discouraged Bishop from enrolling at Cornell Medical School, a decision that kept Bishop on a literary path. What Moore modeled was not a style to copy but a method: find poetic material in places the literary mainstream does not look. Bishop’s growing willingness to use specific, unexpected natural details as structural elements of her poems is one measurable effect of the exchange, though the record does not allow a clean separation between Moore’s direct influence and what Bishop would have found on her own.
The correspondence was not one-directional. Bishop’s questions, responses, and eventually her published work fed back into the exchange. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award for Poetry in 1970, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 1976.
The Edges of the Story
Before closing, two points deserve direct statement. The “approximately 38 years” figure runs from the March 1934 meeting to Moore’s death in February 1972; some accounts of this episode use a shorter estimate of roughly 35 years, without specifying what terminal point they are counting toward. The longer figure is the one the Vassar Encyclopedia and the computed dates support, but either way the word “approximately” belongs there.
The broader claim sometimes attached to this story, that female creative collaboration has been historically underrepresented in the literary record, may well be correct. It rests here, though, on a single documented example, and a single case is evidence of possibility rather than proof of pattern.
What the record does settle is narrower than any general claim and, in its way, more durable: a librarian who had attempted this kind of introduction before, without much success, got it right once. The result was more than 200 letters, two significant bodies of work developed partly in dialogue with each other, and a bracelet repaired with nail scissors at Madison Square Garden.