Bishop was greatly influenced by the poet Marianne Moore,[10] to whom she was introduced by a librarian at Vassar in 1934. Moore took a keen interest in Bishop's work and, at one point, Moore dissuaded Bishop from attending Cornell Medical School, where Bishop had briefly enrolled after moving to New York City following her Vassar graduation. Regarding Moore's influence on Bishop's writing, Bishop's friend and Vassar peer, the writer Mary McCarthy stated, "Certainly between Bishop and Marianne Moore there are resemblances: the sort of close microscopic inspection of certain parts of experience. [However,] I think there is something a bit too demure about Marianne Moore, and there's nothing demure about Elizabeth Bishop."[11] Moore helped Bishop first publish some of her poems in an anthology called Trial Balances in which established poets introduced the work of unknown, younger poets.[11]
It was four years before Bishop addressed "Dear Miss Moore" as "Dear Marianne" and only then at the elder poet's invitation. The friendship between the two women, memorialized by an extensive correspondence,[12] endured until Moore's death in 1972. Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" (1955) contains allusions on several levels to Moore's 1924 poem "A Grave".[13]
She was introduced to Robert Lowell by Randall Jarrell in 1947, and they became great friends, mostly through their written correspondence, until Lowell's death in 1977. After his death, she wrote, "our friendship, [which was] often kept alive through years of separation only by letters, remained constant and affectionate, and I shall always be deeply grateful for it."[14] They also influenced each other's poetry. Lowell cited Bishop's influence on his poem "Skunk Hour" which he said, "[was] modeled on Miss Bishop's 'The Armadillo'."[15] Also, his poem "The Scream" is "derived from ... Bishop's story 'In the Village'."[16] "North Haven", one of the last of her poems published during her lifetime, was written in memory of Lowell in 1978.
