SOURCE: "Moore, Bishop, and Oliver: Thinking Back, Re-Seeing the Sea," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 39, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 364-79.

In the following essay, Fast uses images of the sea offered in the poems of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Mary Oliver to demonstrate that the literary influence of women writers upon one another differs from that of their male counterparts.

Several poems by Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Mary Oliver offer an extended and illuminating example of what it might mean, in Virginia Woolf s phrase, for women writers to "think back through our mothers" (79), or, in Alicia Ostriker's terms, to "re-think ourselves by re-thinking them" (475). The friendship of Moore and Bishop is well documented.¹ Although there exists to date no definitive, explicit evidence of connection between Oliver and either Bishop or Moore, a deep responsiveness to Bishop's work, and through it, to Moore's, resonates from many of...