An Enabling Humility: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Uses of Tradition

Merrin examines these poets' debts to and feminist departures from Renaissance and Romantic models, focusing on Sir Thomas Browne, George Herbert, and William Wordsworth. While her final argument that Moore and Bishop idiosyncratically combine a patri- and matrilinear heritage is well reasoned, her beginning chapters are too closely concerned with particulars of style and with Christian thematics (secularized in Bishop) to support it. Lack of evidence also weakens Merrin's claim for these poets' "maternal transformation and assimilation of congenial male sources." With conclusions too broad for its narrowly focused beginning, this is a useful but not fully coherent book.