Marianne Moore Biography | Author of The Fish

The Fish Author Biography

Known for her precise and measured observations of insects and animals, an often ironic tone, and idiosyncratic form, Marianne Craig Moore offered modern poetry a compelling alternative to T. S. Eliot's fragmented universe of archaic allusions, William Carlos Williams's speech-based poetics, and Wallace Stevens's flowery meditations on reality and the imagination. A naturalist as much as a poet, Moore wrote poetry with a painter's eye, packing an entire world of meaning into a single image. Her quirky rhyme schemes, odd stanzaic patterns, and use of unconventional syllabic patterns caused some critics to ask if she was even a poet. Moore often asked the same question.

Moore was born in 1887 in Kirkwood, Missouri, to John Milton Moore, a construction engineer, and Mary Warner. Her parents separated before she was born and Marianne never saw her father, who was institutionalized after a nervous breakdown. She grew up...
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