Women Poets: Part Three

Marianne Moore

Marianne More lived from 1887 to 1972. Living most of her life with her mother and working as a secretary and librarian, she wrote striking verse that revolutionized American Poetry. Alongside her quiet domestic existence she mingled with the creative elite of New York’s Greenwich Village.

Her first collection, Poems, in 1921 was published by fellow poet H.D. Without the modest Moore’s knowledge, but Moore soon jumped into the literary world with both feet, publishing Observations in 1924 and serving as editor of the literary magazine The Dial from 1925 to 1929.

It was not until 1935 that she published another book, Selected Poems, which remains among the most highly respected of her works. Her compressed, oddly metered verse, often filled with obscure quotations, won her the Pulitzer prize in 1951. By that time Moore had become an American institution, known for her tricornered hat and her passion for baseball.

Anna Akhmatova

Born in 1888, Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, this lyric poet ranks among Russia’s best. In the first decades of the twentieth century she was a leader of the Acmeist movement that promoted realism over symbolism in poetry. Works such as her Vecher in 1912 and Cheti in 1914 reflected this point of view, expressing romantic scenes and feelings in precise detail. The movement rankled Communist authorities, who saw

Acmeist works as too individualistic, promoting Akhmatova to generate patriotic poems such as Anno Domini MXMXXI in 1922. The poem commemorated the formation of the Soviet Union, but Joseph Stalin’s government viewed Akhmatova as a threat nonetheless. In an attempt to silence her, Stalin had her son imprisoned.

She continued to write, producing Requiem, her masterpiece, and Iva during this period. Her last poems, works of stunning visual beauty, included the autobiographical Poema Bez Geroya in 1962.

Nelly Sachs

The literary fascism and ruthless oppression practiced by the Nazis forced many German writers to leave their homeland during World War II. Among the expatriates was Nelly Sachs, who settled permanently in Sweden in 1940. Writing in German, she produced a major body of lyrical verse including the collections In den Wohnungen des Todes in 1946 and Flucht und Verwandlung in 1959. Poem such as “O the Chimneys,” a poignant commemoration of the Jewish Holocaust, made her aco-winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966.

Elizabeth Bishop

Having lived between 1911 to 1979, this American poet, winner of a 1955 Pulitzer prize and a 1969 National Book Award, earned her the admiration of critics and writers both during her life and after her death. Her works blends precise contemplations and emotional and spiritual matters and meticulous descriptions of the physical world. She started publishing while still a student at Vassar College and became a protegee of Marianne Moore.

After her graduation she took up a life of almost perpetual travel, settling in Brazil from 1951 to 1966. Her work, volumes such as North & South in 1946, Questions Of Travel in 1965 and Geography III in 1976, display Bishop’s preoccupation with places and their meaning.