Moore, Bishop, and Oliver: thinking back, re-seeking the sea - poets Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Mary Oliver

"The Waves," perhaps, makes clearest the conversational quality of the relationship among these three poets. Moore's and Bishop's poems have clearly offered Oliver an opportunity for speech, for exchange, which Oliver accepts, as she adopts her predecessors' images and insights and remakes them, not agonistically, yet with her own insights (and her own sea-evoking form: what Bishop accomplishes with long lines and repetitions, Oliver does through short, symmetrically cresting stanzas). Oliver's fishermen are courageous though she doesn't say as much: they will not "stand in the middle," as Moore knew they couldn't; rather they spin "out / from the rickety pier," no safer, though less presumptuous, in their action than was Moore's man in his stolidity. Oliver's gulls, screaming while they float in the sun, and her "glittering / laden nets" ("glittering" both more brightly and more harshly than Bishop's silver sea and benches) capture the ways she has found to honor, answer, and think through her predecessors' works to perceptions that both include and add to their own with the promise of ongoing conversation.

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