Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore (15 November 1887 – 5 February 1972) was an American poet whose precise, idiosyncratic, intellectually rigorous verse made her one of the essential figures of American modernism — admired by T.S. Eliot, who wrote the introduction to her Selected Poems (1935), by Ezra Pound, who published her early work, by Elizabeth Bishop, who regarded her as a mentor, and by W.H. Auden, who called her “one of the greatest living poets.” Her Collected Poems (1951) won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize — a triple crown no other poet has achieved. She is the poet of animals, armour, precision, and ethical conduct: her poems about the pangolin, the jerboa, the frigate pelican, and the paper nautilus are simultaneously natural history, moral philosophy, and formal invention.

Life and Career

Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, near St. Louis. Her father, an engineer and inventor, suffered a mental breakdown before her birth and was institutionalised; she never met him. She was raised by her mother, Mary Warner Moore, and her maternal grandfather, a Presbyterian minister — and she lived with her mother for nearly the entirety of her adult life, a domestic arrangement that has fascinated biographers.

She attended Bryn Mawr College (class of 1909), where she studied biology and histology — subjects that shaped her poetry’s attention to the structures and surfaces of the natural world. After graduation she taught at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (where the athlete Jim Thorpe was a student) and then moved with her mother to New York City in 1918.

Her early poems appeared in The Egoist, Poetry, and other modernist journals. Poems (1921) was published in London by Bryher and H.D. — without Moore’s knowledge or consent, an act of admiring piracy. Observations (1924) — her first American collection, which she controlled — won the Dial Award and established her reputation. From 1925 to 1929 she edited The Dial, the premier American literary magazine of the era, bringing to the editorship the same exacting standards she applied to her verse.

Selected Poems (1935), with Eliot’s introduction (“her poems form part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time”), and What Are Years (1941) deepened her reputation. Nevertheless (1944) and Collected Poems (1951) — the triple-prize winner — cemented it. Her later years were marked by an unlikely celebrity: she threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium (1968), was featured in fashion magazines, and became a recognisable public figure in her trademark tricorne hat and cape.

Themes and Style

Moore’s poetry is built on a paradox: it is simultaneously the most impersonal and the most idiosyncratic poetry of the modernist period. She rarely writes about herself — her subjects are animals, artefacts, places, ideas — but her sensibility is so distinctive that every poem is unmistakably hers.

Her signature formal innovation is the syllabic stanza: stanzas structured not by meter (stressed and unstressed syllables) but by syllable count, with each stanza repeating the pattern of the first. The result is a verse that looks regular on the page but sounds, to the ear trained on iambic pentameter, completely free — a liberation from the tyranny of the beat that is as radical, in its way, as free verse.

Her other distinguishing feature is quotation. Moore’s poems are densely woven with quoted material — from newspaper articles, advertisements, travel guides, government publications, scientific journals — incorporated into the poem and acknowledged in elaborate footnotes. The effect is to make the poem a collage of voices and registers, a technique that anticipates postmodern strategies by decades.

Her animal poems — “The Pangolin,” “The Jerboa,” “The Fish,” “The Frigate Pelican,” “The Paper Nautilus” — are her most famous works and her most characteristic. They are not allegories (the animals do not “stand for” human qualities) but acts of attention: Moore observes the animal with the precision of a naturalist and then discovers in its form, behaviour, or armour a principle — of grace, of self-protection, of economy — that is simultaneously aesthetic and moral.

Her poem “Poetry” — which famously begins “I, too, dislike it” and defines poems as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” — is one of the most frequently quoted statements about the art. Characteristically, she revised it obsessively throughout her career, at one point reducing it from thirty lines to three.

Critical Standing

Moore is one of the central figures of American modernism, alongside Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams. Her influence on subsequent poets — Bishop, Ashbery, and the Language poets in particular — is substantial. Her combination of intellectual rigour, ethical seriousness, and formal inventiveness has no equivalent.

Key Works

• Observations (1924)
• Selected Poems (1935)
• What Are Years (1941)
• Collected Poems (1951)
• Complete Poems (1967)

Collecting Moore

Poems (1921, Egoist Press, London) — the unauthorised first collection — is extremely rare and brings $2,000–$8,000. Observations (1924, Dial Press) brings $500–$2,000. Selected Poems (1935, Macmillan) with Eliot’s introduction brings $200–$600. Later collections are more readily available. Moore’s correspondence (she was a prolific letter writer) and signed broadsides are also collected.