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Marianne Moore
Marianne Craig Moore (November 15, 1887 – February 5, 1972) was an
Marianne Moore
American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted
for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit.
Contents
Early life
Poetic career
Poetic style
Involvement in the American suffrage movement
Selected works
References
External links
Moore entered Bryn Mawr College in 1905. She was graduated four years later with an A.B., having majored in history,
economics, and political science.[4] The poet H.D. was among her classmates during their freshman year. At Bryn
Mawr, Moore started writing short stories and poems for Tipyn O'Bob,[5] the campus literary magazine, and decided
to become a writer. After graduation, she worked briefly at Melvil Dewey's Lake Placid Club, then taught business
subjects at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School from 1911 to 1914.
Poetic career
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Moore's first professionally published poems appeared in The Egoist and Poetry in the spring of 1915. Harriet Monroe,
the editor of the latter, would describe them in her biography as possessing "an elliptically musical profundity".[6]
In 1916, Moore moved with her mother to Chatham, New Jersey, a community with commuting transportation to
Manhattan. Two years later, the two moved to New York City's Greenwich Village, where Moore socialized with many
avant-garde artists, especially those associated with Others magazine. The innovative poems she was writing at that
time received high praise from Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D., T. S. Eliot, and later, Wallace Stevens.
Moore's first book, Poems, was published without her permission in 1921 by the Imagist poet H.D. and H.D.'s partner,
the British novelist Bryher.[4][7] Moore's later poetry shows some influence from the Imagists' principles.[8]
Her second book, Observations, won the Dial Award in 1924. She worked part-time as a librarian during these years;
then from 1925 to 1929, she edited The Dial magazine, a literary and cultural journal. This position in the literary and
arts community extended her influence as an arbiter of modernist taste; much later, she encouraged promising young
poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, and James Merrill. When The Dial ceased
publication in 1929, she moved to 260 Cumberland Street[9] in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, where she
remained for thirty-six years. She continued to write while caring for her ailing mother, who died in 1947. For nine
years before and after her mother's death, Moore translated the Fables of LaFontaine.
In 1933, Moore was awarded the Helen Haire Levinson Prize by Poetry
magazine. In 1951, her Collected Poems won the National Book Award,[10]
the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bollingen Prize. In the book's introduction, T. S.
Eliot wrote, "My conviction has remained unchanged for the last 14 years
that Miss Moore's poems form part of the small body of durable poetry
written in our time."[3] After years of seclusion, she emerged as a celebrity,
speaking at college campuses across the country and appearing in
photographic essays in Life and Look magazines. Moore became a member
of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955.[3] She was elected a
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1962.[11] Moore
continued to publish poems in various magazines, including, The Nation,
The New Republic, Partisan Review, and The New Yorker, as well as
publishing various books and collections of her poetry and criticism.
She moved to 35 West Ninth Street in Manhattan in 1965. After she moved
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
back to Greenwich Village, she was widely recognized around town for her
(1935)
tricorn hat and black cape. She liked athletics and was a great admirer of
Muhammad Ali, for whose spoken-word album I Am the Greatest! she
wrote the liner notes. She became known as a baseball fan, first of the Brooklyn Dodgers and then of the New York
Yankees. She threw out the ball to open the season at Yankee Stadium in 1968.
Moore suffered a series of strokes in her last years. She died in 1972, and her ashes were interred with those of her
mother at the family's burial plot at the Evergreen Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.[12][13] By the time of her
death, she had received many honorary degrees and virtually every honor available to an American poet. The New
York Times printed a full-page obituary.[14] In 1996, she was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.[15]
Moore corresponded with Ezra Pound from 1918, and visited him regularly during his incarceration at St. Elizabeth's.
She opposed Benito Mussolini and Fascism from the start, and objected to Pound's antisemitism. Moore was a
Republican and supported Herbert Hoover in 1928 and 1932.[16][17][18] She was a lifelong ally and friend of the
American poet Wallace Stevens, as demonstrated in her review of Stevens's first collection, Harmonium, and, in
particular, by her comment about the influence of Henri Rousseau on the poem "Floral Decorations for Bananas". She
also corresponded, from 1943 to 1961, with the reclusive collage artist Joseph Cornell, whose methods of collecting
and appropriation were much like her own.[19]
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In 1955, Moore was invited informally by David Wallace, manager of marketing research for Ford's "E-car" project,
and his co-worker Bob Young, to suggest a name for the car. Wallace's rationale was "Who better to understand the
nature of words than a poet?" On October 1955, Moore was approached to submit "inspirational names" for the E-car,
and on November 7, she offered her list of names, which included such notables as "Resilient Bullet", "Ford Silver
Sword", "Mongoose Civique", "Varsity Stroke", "Pastelogram", and "Andante con Moto". On December 8, she
submitted her last and most famous name, "Utopian Turtletop". The E-car was christened by Ford as the Edsel.[20]
Moore never married. Her living room has been preserved in its original layout in the collections of the Rosenbach
Museum and Library in Philadelphia.[21] Her entire library, knick-knacks (including a baseball signed by Mickey
Mantle), all of her correspondence, photographs, and poetry drafts are available for public viewing.
Like Robert Lowell, Moore revised many of her early poems in later life. Most of these revised works appeared in the
Complete Poems of 1967. Facsimile editions of the theretofore out-of-print 1924 Observations became available in
2002. Since that time, there has been no critical consensus about which versions are authoritative. As Moore wrote, as
a one-line epigraph to Complete Poems, which offered her well-known work "Poetry" cut down from twenty-nine lines
to three: "Omissions are not accidents."[22][23][24] In a foreword to A Marianne Moore Reader in 1961, Moore said her
favorite poem was the Book of Job.[25]
In 2012, she was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of The Camperdown elm in Prospect Park,
Fame. which benefits from a fund established in
Moore's will
Poetic style
Moore's most famous poem is perhaps the one entitled, appropriately, "Poetry", in which she hopes for poets who can
produce "imaginary gardens with real toads in them". It also expressed her idea that meter, or anything else that
claims the exclusive title "poetry", is not so important as delight in language and precise, heartfelt expression in any
form. Moore's meter was radically separate from the English tradition; writing her syllabic poems after the advent of
free verse, she was encouraged thereby to try previously unusual meters.[27]
She credited the poetry of Edith Sitwell as "intensifying her interest in rhythm and encouraging her rhythmic
eccentricities".[1] In response to a biographical sketch in 1935, Moore indicated "a liking for unaccented rhyme, the
movement of the poem musically is more important than the conventional look of lines upon the page, and the stanza
as the unit of composition rather than the line".[2] Later in her Selected Poems of 1969, she also commented in regard
to her poetic form, that "in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I
have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition".[28]
Moore often composed her poetry in syllabics, she used stanzas with a predetermined number of syllables as her "unit
of sense", with indentation underlining the parallels, the shape of the stanza indicating the syllabic disposition, and
her reading voice conveying the syntactical line.[29] These syllabic lines from "Poetry" illustrate her position: poetry is
a matter of skill and honesty in any form whatsoever, while anything written poorly, although in perfect form, cannot
be poetry:
nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and
school-books": all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry
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Selected works
Poems, 1921 (Published in London by H.D. and Bryher. Moore disapproved of the timing, editing, selections, and
format of this collection. See The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, ed. Bonnie Costello et al. (New York:
Knopf, 1997), p. 164. In a letter to Bryher, Moore notes, "I wouldn't have the poems appear now if I could help it
and would not have some of them ever appear and would make certain changes.")
Observations, 1924
Selected Poems, 1935 (introduction by T. S. Eliot)
The Pangolin and Other Verse, 1936
What Are Years, 1941
Nevertheless, 1944
A Face, 1949
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References
1. Molesworth, Charles. Introduction. Marianne Moore: A Literary Life. New York: Macmillan, 1990.
ISBN 0689118155
2. Letter to Miss Gray (November 5, 1935), reproduced in Molesworth, Charles, Marianne Moore: A Literary Life.
New York: Macmillan, 1990. ISBN 0689118155
3. Literary St. Louis (https://archive.org/details/LiterarySt.Louis). St. Louis, Missouri: Associates of St. Louis
University Libraries, Inc. and Landmarks Association of St. Louis, Inc. 1969.
4. Leavell, Linda. Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore. New York: Farrar Straus and
Giroux, 2014. ISBN 9780374534943
5. https://archive.org/stream/lantern1619stud#page/n251/mode/2up/search/marianne+moore |Tipyn O'Bob at
Internet Archive
6. Monroe, Harriet. A Poets's Life. New York: Macmillan, 1938.
7. Pinsky, Robert. Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters. New York: W.
W. Norton, 2014. ISBN 9780393050684
8. Pratt, William. Introduction. The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature. New York: Dutton, 1963.
ISBN 9780972814386
9. Page, Chester. Memoirs of a Charmed Life in New York. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2007.
10. "National Book Awards – 1952" (https://www.nationalbook.org/awards-prizes/national-book-awards-1952).
National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-02.
(With acceptance speech by Moore and essay by Lee Felice Pinkas from the Awards' 60-year anniversary blog.)
11. "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter M" (http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterM.pdf)
(PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved July 29, 2014.
12. "Evergreen Cemetery Part 11" (http://www.gettysburgdaily.com/evergreen-cemetery-part-11-with-licensed-battlefie
ld-guide-deb-novotny/). Gettysburg Daily. Retrieved 11 October 2016.
13. Linda Leavell (5 November 2013). Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore (https://book
s.google.com/books?id=ZetmAgAAQBAJ). Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-30183-6.
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External links
Marianne Moore reading her poem "Bird-Witted" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&=en&client=mv-vfvf-uk
&v=GEuEkW-1oPk)
Yale College Lecture on Marianne Moore (http://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-310/lecture-17) audio, video and full
transcripts from Open Yale Courses
"Marianne Moore" (http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/96). Academy of American Poets. http://poets.org
website: biography, 6 poems, prose, and criticism.
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Donald Hall (Summer–Fall 1961). "Marianne Moore, The Art of Poetry No. 4" (http://www.theparisreview.org/interv
iews/4637/the-art-of-poetry-no-4-marianne-moore). The Paris Review.
St. Louis Walk of Fame (http://www.stlouiswalkoffame.org/inductees/marianne-moore.html)
Modern American Poetry: Marianne Moore (http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/moore/moore.htm)
Works by or about Marianne Moore (https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28%28subject%3A%22Moore%2C%
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9%20OR%20%28%221887-1972%22%20AND%20Moore%29%29%20AND%20%28-mediatype:software%29) at
Internet Archive
Marianne Moore (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/738) at Find a Grave
Works by Marianne Moore (https://librivox.org/author/4699) at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
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