To Work "Lovingly": Marianne Moore at Bryn Mawr, 1905-1909

In an August 1921 letter to her friend Bryher, Marianne Moore wrote that her experience at Bryn Mawr gave her “security in my determination to have what I want.”² She described to Bryher the “intellectual wealth” she had received there as not something that could be “superimposed,” but something that must be “appropriated” (Selected Letters, p. 178). This statement is perhaps Moore’s strongest and most direct youthful declaration of literary ambition and points to the central role that Bryn Mawr played in her career. Despite Moore’s claim, Bryn Mawr’s crucial significance to her development as a poet remains largely unexplored, with the notable exception of Patricia Willis’ discussion of the Bryn Mawr letters. Willis argues that it was at Bryn Mawr that Moore “became wise in the ways of success and adversity, praise and criticism, hard work and the private consolation of having done one’s best.”³

Further inquiry into Moore’s experience at Bryn Mawr provides a fruitful starting point for new readings of Moore’s poetry that emphasize her strong feminist voice and offer ways in which we might reconsider the cultural history of women’s poetic production. Many of America’s major women poets, for instance, attended women’s colleges, including Emily Dickinson, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, and Sylvia Plath. As Gail McDonald’s work on Pound and Eliot suggests, focusing on a poet’s education can illuminate an artist’s definition of self and work, particularly at a time, as McDonald argues, when the future of poetry itself became tied to the academy.⁴

Moore, who graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1909, was among the second generation of women to enter college in America.⁵ This generation was particularly interesting, according to Lynn Gordon, as it represented a “transitional” one between Victorian and modern America.⁶ Moore’s letters home during this time reveal that Bryn Mawr combined what Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has called a “female world of love and ritual,” a nineteenth-century concept, with twentieth-century ideas of the New Woman, the strong, independent young professional women who were emerging from women’s colleges at the beginning of the century.⁷ The college campus of Moore’s years at Bryn Mawr was a place where “female separatism, social activism, and belief in a special mission for educated women characterized [the students’] activities.”⁸

Bryn Mawr’s radical feminist president M. Carey Thomas fostered close ties among women because she felt that they provided support for women in their pursuit of professional careers. Ritual practices, such as tea ceremonies and May Day celebrations, according to Virginia Wolf Briscoe, helped women create a sense of community on the Bryn Mawr campus.⁹ These close relationships were combined with an emphasis on academic rigor and individual achievement. By encouraging women to consider their lives in terms of “purposeful social, civic, and professional activity,” Bryn Mawr brought “women’s culture into the public sphere.”¹⁰

Moore’s letters home and the writing which she published at Bryn Mawr during these years indicate that she benefitted from Victorian female culture even as she rejected those aspects of the culture that warned women about the dangers of going to college. Moore’s early writing also demonstrates that her sense of herself as a modern professional woman developed at Bryn Mawr, and it was there that Moore tried out new kinds of writing, published, and began to establish herself within an avant-garde tradition. In short, it was at Bryn Mawr that Moore—to borrow Gail McDonald’s phrase—”learned to be modern.” Learning to be modern for Moore meant that she must create space for the female artist within the male-dominated avant-garde, and this is what she set out to do in her Bryn Mawr writing. It was the crucial mapping of this territory that paved the way for the stunning poetry of Moore’s 1924 Observations, with such poems as “Black Earth” (1918) and “Peter” (1924)¹¹ that strongly convey the sensuality and power of the...