Marianne Moore
(1887 - 1972)
(Full name Marianne Craig Moore) American poet, essayist, translator, short story writer, editor, playwright, and author of children's books.
Marianne Moore: Introd...
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Biography EssayMarianne Moore made a new kind of verse, yet she denied that she was a poet. She worked with words: they were her trade. What she wrote was called poetry, she said, because there was no...
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Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was an American poet, editor, reviewer, and translator. Her poetry is an innovative mixture of common and exotic things and creatures, forthright and imaginatively playful.M...
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Marianne Moore made a new kind of verse, yet she denied that she was a poet. She worked with words: they were her trade. What she wrote was called poetry, she said, because there was no other category...
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In the following essay, Garrigue provides an assessment of the poetry and career of Marianne Moore.
We know this poet by her voice, by her “astonishing invention in a single mode,” by he...
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In the following essay, Holley discusses the poems Moore published during her years at Bryn Mawr College, all of which appeared in the campus magazines Tipyn O'Bob and The Lantern.
Originality,...
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In the following essay, Holley provides an overview of poems written during the first several years of Moore's post-college career.
The seven years between her graduation in 1909 and her move i...
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In the following essay, Holley examines the unique characteristics of Moore's poetry during the decade from the mid-1940s through the mid-1950s, a period during which she received numerous awar...
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In the following essay, Engel offers a critical overview of the poetry produced by Moore from the late 1950s through the publication of “Prevalent at One Time” in the fall of 1970, the l...
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In the following essay, Merrin offers a critical assessment of Moore's poem, “A Grave.”
“Man looking into the sea” begins Marianne Moore's first published ver...
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In the following essay, Erickson offers an introduction to Moore's poetry, focusing in particular on a sense of magic and imagination inherent in the poet's work.
...
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In the following essay, Heuving explores the influence of gender on Moore's voice and identity as a literary figure among predominantly male peers.
What allows us to proceed … is that we...
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In the following essay, Heuving contrasts specific examples of Moore's poetry with thematically similar poems by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.
Some feminine poets of the...
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In the following essay, Hicok explores “Bryn Mawr's crucial significance to [Moore's development as a poet.”]
In an August 1921 letter to her friend Bryher, Marianne Moore ...
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Critical Essay by Stanley Kunitz
Miss Moore is unique, and she never argues. Like peace she is indivisible, and of her verse it can be said that nothing resembles it so much as her prose. Not the leas...
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Critical Essay by Wallace Stevens
Somehow, there is a difference between Miss Moore's bird [the ostrich of "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron'"] and the bird of the Encyclopa...
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Critical Essay by Cleanth Brooks
[The] soundest account of the general function which Miss Moore's birds and beasts perform in her poetry [is that] they provide the perspective through which to...
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Critical Essay by William Carlos Williams
[Marianne Moore's] is a talent which diminishes the tomtoming on the hollow men of a wasteland to an irrelevant pitter-patter. Nothing is hollow or was...
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Critical Essay by Pamela White Hadas
Throughout my study of Marianne Moore's poetry I have found myself coming back again and again to two particularly intriguing questions that are intimately ...
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Critical Essay by T. S. Eliot
I have read Miss Moore's poems a good many times, and always with exactly the same pleasure, and satisfaction in something quite definite and solid. (p. 48)
Miss M...
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Critical Essay by R. P. Blackmur
In Miss Moore's work inverted commas are made to perform significantly and notably and with a fresh nicety which is part of her contribution to the language. Be...
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Critical Essay by Louise Bogan
Impressionist critics, because they have attributed to Miss Moore many of their own manias and virtues, have left her actual virtue—her "secret"...
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Critical Essay by David Hsin-fu Wand
Unlike Wallace Stevens who is known to have quoted lines of Chinese poetry in his writing … Marianne Moore never makes direct references to or gives quotati...
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Critical Essay by Hugh Kenner
Miss Moore's poems deal in many separate acts of attention, all close-up; optical puns, seen by snapshot, in a poetic normally governed by the eye, sometimes by th...
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Critical Essay by Ezra Pound
It is possible, as I have written, or intended to write elsewhere, to divide poetry into three sorts: (1.) melopoeia, to wit, poetry which moves by its music, whether it b...
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Critical Essay by Helen Vendler
Moore disliked enigmas and disliked being thought enigmatic; she wanted to be lucid without sacrificing implication. The deliberate (as it seemed) hermeticism of some m...
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Critical Essay by Hilton Kramer
The career of Marianne Moore … provides us with a perfect example of the way a poet's fame may come in time to obscure the essential quality of the poetry...
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Critical Essay by Harriet Monroe
Unquestionably there is a poet within the hard, deliberately patterned crust of such soliloquies as Black Earth, Those Various Scalpels, Pedantic Literalist, Reinforce...
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Critical Essay by T. S. Eliot
The first aspect in which Miss Moore's poetry is likely to strike the reader is that of minute detail rather than that of emotional unity. The gift for detailed ob...
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Critical Essay by John Crowe Ransom
[Mr. T. S. Eliot] is a major voyager on one stream of modernity with which we have a good acquaintance, but it is not the pellucid stream that Miss Moore is embarke...
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Critical Essay by Lloyd Frankenberg
The enchanting and enchanted mind defines imagination. And it is her imagination that defines the mind of Marianne Moore; an imagination articulated by fact…...
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Critical Essay by Louise Bogan
As we read ["The Steeple-Jack," in Collected Poems,] we begin to understand that we are not being offered a piece of mere realism: we are participating in ...
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Critical Essay by Randall Jarrell
Miss Moore's prose-seeming, matter-of-factly rhythmed syllabic verse, the odd look most of her poems have on the page (their unusual stanzaic patterns, their w...
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Critical Essay by Hugh Kenner
One might sort Miss Moore's poems into those that observe, meditate, and enact in this way, the rigorous pattern a dimension of meditation and enactment; those tha...
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Critical Essay by Brad Leithauser
It was like [Moore] to infuse the natural world with a sense of human willfulness, and like her also to derive moral sustenance from nature. She took as heroes—...
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In the following essay, McMahon examines two poems which offer critical views of sex and matrimony, Marianne Moore's "Marriage" and Sandra McPherson's "Streamers. &#...
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Moore, Marianne
Marianne Moore
Marianne (Craig) Moore
