Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore (1887-1972) once said that her writing could be called poetry
only because there was no other name for it. Indeed, her poems appear to be
extremely compressed essays that happen to be printed in jagged lines on the
page. Her subjects were varied: animals, laborers, artists, and the craft of poetry.
From her general reading came quotations that she found striking or insightful.
She included these in her poems, scrupulously enclosed in quotation marks, and
sometimes identified in footnotes. Of this practice, she wrote, "Why many
quotation marks?" I am asked ... When a thing has been so well that it could not
be said better, why paraphrase it? Hence, my writing is, if not a cabinet of
fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber." Close observation and
concentration on detail and the methods of her poetry.
Marianne Moore grew up in Kirkwood, Missouri, near St. Lois. After
graduation from Bryn Mawr College in 1909, she taught commercial subjects at
the Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Later she became a librarian in
New York City. During the 1920’s she was editor of The Dial, an important
literary magazine of the period. She lived quietly all her life, mostly in
Brooklyn, New York. She spent a lot of time at the Bronx Zoo, fascinated by
animals. Her admiration of the Brooklyn Dodgers-before the team moved to Los
Angeles-was widely known.
Her first book of poems was published in London in 1921 by a group of friends
associated with the Imagist movement. From that time on her poetry has been
read with interest by succeeding generations of poets and readers. In 1952 she
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Poems. She wrote that she did
not write poetry for money or fame. To earn a living is needful, but it can be
done in routine ways. One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify
what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.
1. What is the passage mainly about?
