All my life I have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper - just running down the edges of different countries and continents, 'looking for something'.

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 (see One Art) endured until Moore's death in 1972.

She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950 the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956 the National Book Award winner in 1970 and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Elizabeth Bishop (February 8 1911 – October 6 1979) was an American poet and short-story writer.