Life & Wisdom Quote by Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore’s line lands like a polite shrug with a blade inside it. She’s not rejecting poetry so much as questioning the institutional reflex to sort art into tidy bins. The “except” is doing heavy work: she concedes the label only because taxonomy demands one, not because the label captures what she’s making. That’s classic Moore - controlled, wry, and quietly defiant.

The intent is partly strategic. Moore wrote in an era when “poetry” came preloaded with expectations: lyric confession, elevated music, a certain kind of “beautiful.” Her own work is famously hybrid: syllabic patterns that don’t announce themselves, quotations and collage, close observation that can read like natural history notes or moral essay. By calling her poems “work,” she frames them as crafted objects rather than emotional spill. It’s a refusal of the poet-as-oracle pose.

Subtext: the category “poetry” is less a description than a filing system, and filing systems always misrepresent what they file. There’s also a feminist edge. For a woman modernist, being placed in the “poetry” box could mean being domesticated as tasteful, minor, decorative. Moore insists on being unplaceable; she makes classification feel like the weaker party.

Context matters: modernism was busy breaking genres and distrusting inherited forms. Moore’s twist is that she doesn’t trumpet the rupture; she underplays it. The wit is that her disclaimer is itself poetic - compressed, ironic, and exact. She’s telling you the form is inadequate, then proving its elasticity by making that complaint sing.