Marianne Moore



Marianne Moore (November 15, 1887 - February 5, 1972) was an Modernist American poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.

Life
Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor John Milton Moore and his wife, Mary Warner. She grew up in her grandfather's household, her father having left the family before her birth. In 1905, Moore entered Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and graduated four years later. She taught at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, until 1915, when Moore began to publish poetry professionally.

Career
Moore came to the attention of poets as diverse as Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, H.D., T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound beginning with her first publication in 1915. From 1925 until 1929, Moore served as editor of the literary and cultural journal The Dial. This continued her role, similar to that of Pound, as a patron of poetry; much later, she encouraged promising young poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery and James Merrill.

Moore became a minor celebrity in New York literary circles. She attended boxing matches, baseball games and other public events, dressed in what became her signature garb, a tricorn hat and a black cape. She particularly liked athletics and athletes and was a great admirer of Muhammad Ali, for whose spoken-word album, I Am the Greatest!, she wrote liner notes. Moore continued to publish poems in various journals, including The Nation, The New Republic, and Partisan Review, as well as publishing various books and collections of her poetry and criticism.

Moore corresponded with Ezra Pound from 1919, even during his incarceration. She opposed Benito Mussolini and Fascism from the start and objected to Pound's antisemitism. Moore herself was a conservative Republican and supported Herbert Hoover in 1928 and 1932. She was a life-long ally and friend of the American poet Wallace Stevens. See for instance her review of Stevens's first anthology, Harmonium, and in particular her comment about the influence of Henri Rousseau on the poem "Floral Decorations for Bananas'".

Her 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 as important as delight in language and precise, heartfelt expression in any form. She often composed her own poetry in syllabics. 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:

One must make a distinction
 * however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry

Later years
In 1955, Moore was informally invited by David Wallace, manager of marketing research for Ford's "E-car" project, and his co-worker Bob Young to provide input with regard to the naming of 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 finally christened by Ford as the Edsel.

Moore moved to 35 West 9th Street in Manhattan in 1966, after 37 years at 260 Cumberland Street in Brooklyn. Not long after throwing the first pitch for the 1968 season in Yankee Stadium, Moore suffered a stroke. She suffered a series of strokes thereafter, and died in 1972. She was interred in Gettysburg's Evergreen Cemetery. The New York Times devoted an entire page to an account of her life and death.

Moore never married. Her living room has been preserved in its original layout in the collections of the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia. 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 a great many of her early poems (including "Poetry") in later life. These appeared in The Complete Poems of 1967, after which critics tended to accept as canonical the "elderly Moore's revisions of the exuberant texts of her own poetic youth." 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.

Recognition
In 1933, Moore was awarded the Helen Haire Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine.

Her Collected Poems of 1951 is perhaps her most rewarded work; it earned the poet the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize.

In 1996, she was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

Poetry

 * Poems, Egoist Press, 1921, published with additions as Observations, Dial, 1924.
 * Selected Poems, introduction by T.S. Eliot, Macmillan, 1935.
 * Pangolin, and Other Verse: Five Poems, Brendin, 1936.
 * What Are Years and Other Poems, Macmillan, 1941.
 * Nevertheless, Macmillan, 1944.
 * A Face, 1949.
 * Collected Poems, Macmillan, 1951.
 * Like a Bulwark, Viking, 1956.
 * O to Be a Dragon, Viking, 1959.
 * A Marianne Moore Reader, Viking, 1961.
 * Eight Poems, illustrations by Robert Andrew Parker, New York Museum of Modern Art, 1962.
 * Occasionem cognosce, Stinehour Press, 1963.
 * The Arctic Ox, Faber, 1964.
 * Dress and Kindred Subjects, Ibex Press, 1965.
 * Le mariage..., Ibex Press, 1965.
 * A Talisman, Adams House, 1965.
 * Poetry and Criticism, privately printed, 1965.
 * Silence, L. H. Scott, 1965.
 * Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics (poetry and prose), Viking, 1966.
 * Tippoo's Tiger, Phoenix Book Shop, 1967.
 * The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, Macmillan, 1967, Penguin, 1987.
 * Selected Poems, Faber, 1969.
 * Unfinished Poems, P.H. and A.S.W. Rosenbach Foundation, 1972.
 * Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907-1924, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2002.

Prose
===Translated===
 * Predilections (essays and reviews), Viking, 1955.
 * Idiosyncrasy and Technique: Two Lectures, University of California Press, 1958.
 * The Absentee: A Comedy in Four Acts (play based on Maria Edgeworth's novel of the same name), House of Books, 1962.
 * The Accented Syllable, Albondocani Press, 1969 (first appeared in Egoist, October, 1916).
 * The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, edited by Patricia C. Willis, Penguin, 1986.
 * (Co-translator) A. Stifter, Rock Crystal, Pantheon, 1945.
 * (Translator) Selected Fables of La Fontaine, Faber, 1955, revised edition, Viking, 1964.
 * Puss in Boots, The Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella (retelling of three fairy tales based on the French tales of Charles Perrault), illustrated by Eugene Karlin, Macmillan, 1963.

Letters

 * Letters from and to the Ford Motor Company, Pierpont Morgan Library, 1958 (first appeared in New Yorker, April l3, 1957 ).
 * The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, edited by Bonnie Costello, Knopf (New York, NY), 1997.
 * Nevertheless, 1944.
 * Collected Poems, 1951.
 * Fables of La Fontaine, 1954. Verse translations of La Fontaine's fables.
 * Predilections: Literary Essays, 1955.
 * Idiosyncrasy and Technique, 1966.
 * Like a Bulwark, 1956.
 * O To Be a Dragon, 1959.
 * Idiosyncrasy and Technique, 1959.
 * The Marianne Moore Reader, 1961.
 * Eight Poems, 1962, with illustrations by Robert Andrew Parker.
 * The Absentee: A Comedy in Four Acts, 1962. A dramatization of Maria Edgeworth's novel.
 * Puss in Boots, The Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, 1963. Adaptations from Perrault.
 * Dress and Kindred Subjects, 1965.
 * Poetry and Criticism, 1965.
 * Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel and Other Topics, 1966.
 * The Complete Poems, 1967.
 * The Accented Syllable, 1969.
 * Homage to Henry James, 1971. Essays by Moore, Edmund Wilson, etc.
 * The Complete Poems, 1981.
 * The Complete Prose, 1986, edited by Patricia C. Willis.
 * The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, edited by Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridge, Cristanne Miller. Knopf, 1997.
 * The Complete Prose, 1986, edited by Patricia C. Willis.
 * The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore, edited by Bonnie Costello, Celeste Goodridge, Cristanne Miller. Knopf, 1997.