Marianne Moore Biography Quotes 22 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Marianne Moore was born on November 15, 1887, in Kirkwood, Missouri, and grew up largely in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in a close household centered on her mother, Mary Warner Moore, and her older brother, John Warner Moore. The family background in Presbyterian discipline and study shaped her sense of ethics and intellectual seriousness. At Bryn Mawr College, where she studied from 1905 to 1909, she pursued biology and related sciences as well as literature. The training in observation and classification she undertook in the laboratory became a lifelong method in her poems: description as inquiry, precision as a form of moral attention. After graduation she worked as a teacher, including a period at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and wrote steadily in her spare hours.

Emergence as a Poet
By the 1910s Moore was sending poems to leading little magazines that defined the experimental culture of the period. She appeared in Poetry, edited by Harriet Monroe, as well as Others, and The Egoist. Writers who mattered to modernism noticed her early: H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams read and promoted her work. In 1921 H.D. and Bryher arranged for the London publication of Poems, an initiative that embarrassed the reticent author but helped establish her reputation. Observations followed in 1924 and affirmed her originality: austere yet witty, philosophical yet grounded in the visible world, and formally exacting.

The Dial and Editorial Influence
Moore moved to New York City in 1918 with her mother and shortly thereafter worked at the New York Public Library. In 1925 she became editor of The Dial, succeeding to leadership after earlier stewardship by Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson Jr. From 1925 until the magazine closed in 1929, she commissioned, arranged, and introduced new work by many of the writers who came to define American modernism: William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, and others. As an editor and critic she combined scruple with openness, shaping The Dial into a venue where rigor and experiment could meet. In that dual role she refined her own taste and craft while mentoring peers and younger writers, a pattern that would continue throughout her career.

Major Works and Style
Moore's poetry builds intricate syllabic stanzas, exacting count against count, and interweaves quoted prose, paraphrase, and gloss to test the truth of what she sees. She often used notes and epigraphs, a scholarly apparatus that never eclipses the quick, moral energy of her language. Her subjects range widely: animals and natural forms (The Fish, The Pangolin, The Paper Nautilus), civic and architectural scenes (The Steeple-Jack), and long meditative set pieces (Marriage; An Octopus, her alpine panorama of Mount Rainier stitched from guidebooks and observation). Her well-known poem Poetry includes the celebrated phrase about presenting imaginary gardens with real toads in them, a witty credo for making art that honors both imagination and fact.

Selected Poems (1935), edited in London with an introduction by T. S. Eliot, showcased her authority to readers abroad and at home. During the 1940s she published new volumes that deepened her reach, and in 1951 her Collected Poems appeared. That book earned a rare triple recognition: the Bollingen Prize in 1951 and, the following year, both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Even in success she kept revising, sometimes pruning drastically; the brief 1967 version of Poetry embodies a lifetime of thinking about what to include and what to leave unsaid.

Friendships and Literary Circle
Moore's literary life was conducted through friendships and letters as much as through institutions. Her mother, Mary Warner Moore, was her constant companion until 1947 and a discerning first reader. Her brother, John, a Navy chaplain and minister, remained a steady presence. Among fellow poets, she maintained durable ties with H.D., Bryher, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams, exchanging work and views with them across decades of magazines, books, and salons. Her mentorship of Elizabeth Bishop is especially notable: Bishop found in Moore a model of exactitude and restraint, and their correspondence reveals the generosity and discipline Moore offered younger writers. Editors and patrons such as Harriet Monroe, Scofield Thayer, and James Sibley Watson Jr. were also crucial, providing platforms that amplified her voice and, through her editorial efforts, the voices of others.

Public Presence and Later Years
After her mother's death, Moore entered public life more fully, reading widely, accepting honorary degrees, and serving as an emblem of literary seriousness that could still laugh. She became a familiar cultural figure, instantly recognizable in her tricorn hat and cape. Her love of sports, especially baseball, surprised those who mistook austerity for narrowness. In 1968 she threw the ceremonial first pitch for the New York Yankees, a light gesture that mirrored the poise and playfulness in her poems. Her curiosity about contemporary culture produced memorable side ventures, including a celebrated exchange with the Ford Motor Company in the mid-1950s when she proposed whimsical names for a new car model. She also continued to write on art and literature; the essay collection Predilections and later volumes such as O To Be a Dragon and Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics exhibit the same mingling of precision and delight that marks her verse. The Complete Poems, published in 1967, gathered her mature work and fixed a canon she was still, in principle, willing to adjust.

Themes, Methods, and Ethos
Moore's art balances restraint and exuberance. She chooses exact nouns and verbs, checks sentiment with data, and then, having verified the terms, opens a path to wonder. The animals in her poems are never mere allegories; they are moral exempla encountered through study. Her quotations are not ornaments but experiments: a way to test thinking against sources and to honor the collaborative nature of knowledge. She insisted on discipline not as a limit but as a liberty, a belief summed up in her essays on humility, concentration, and gusto. If modernism sometimes celebrated shock, Moore preferred a steadier form of innovation, one that makes complexity lucid and integrity audible.

Recognition and Influence
In addition to the Bollingen Prize, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award for Collected Poems, Moore received many honors and invitations that testified to her standing among peers and readers. She judged prizes, lectured, and supported poets who were finding their forms. Randall Jarrell and other critics praised her achievement, and poets of varied schools learned from her syllabic stanzas, her compositional collage, and her moral clarity. Elizabeth Bishop carried elements of Moore's method into a new register of American lyric, while subsequent generations found in Moore a model for making thought felt without abandoning fact.

Final Years and Legacy
Marianne Moore lived and worked in New York for the rest of her life, continuing to write, revise, and appear at readings into her eighties. She died in New York City on February 5, 1972. Her work remains a touchstone for precision and ethical intelligence in American poetry, a testament to the possibility that scholarship and play may coexist in one voice. Her living room and library, preserved by the Rosenbach Museum and Library, offer a material portrait of the habits behind the poems: notebooks, clippings, field guides, and a careful order that mirrors the designs of her stanzas. She stands, finally, as an editor who made a place for others, a critic who practiced what she praised, and a poet whose exacting art enlarged the freedoms of American verse.

Our collection contains 22 quotes who is written by Marianne, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Writing - Overcoming Obstacles - Deep.

Other people realated to Marianne: Louis Kronenberger (Critic)