Marianne Moore

“Everything is worthless but the best and this is the best,” William Carlos Williams said of the poetry of Marianne Moore (b. 1887–d. 1972) in The Dial, though “only,” he warned, “with difficulty discerned” (p. 310). Moore’s brand of modernist difficulty won her the admiration of peers such as Williams, H.D., T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens and has exercised a powerful influence on later poets from Hart Crane to Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery. However, her poems, composed of sinuous Jamesian sentences tightly encased in Moore’s signature syllabic stanzas and packed with citations from a dizzying array of sources high and low, have, as Williams suspected, proven a challenge to less discerning readers. “Critical curiosity, which has fussed over so many twentieth-century pages, has tended to leave Miss Moore’s poems approvingly uninvestigated,” Hugh Kenner lamented in 1963 in Poetry (102.2, p. 115), and although the situation has improved since then, Moore remains understudied relative to her achievement and influence. Born in 1887 and raised in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, by her brilliant, pious mother, Moore never knew her father, who had a breakdown and left the family shortly before her birth. Mother, daughter, and Marianne’s brother, Warner, came to form an extraordinarily close unit, with its own private language and etiquette, and Moore’s writing would be marked by this hermetic family style. In the years after her graduation from Bryn Mawr in 1909, Moore’s poems were rejected by the mainstream publications to which she first sent them, but by the mid-1910s her terse, spiky verses had begun to appear in modernist little magazines like The Egoist, Poetry, and Others. In 1918, Moore moved with her mother to New York City, where her presence on the scene in Greenwich Village accelerated her success. Moore became especially closely associated with the influential journal The Dial, publishing her book, Observations (1924), with the Dial Press, receiving the Dial Prize in 1925, and taking up the magazine’s editorship in that same year, a job she held until it folded in 1929. Selected Poems (1935), edited by T. S. Eliot, included much of the strong, politically charged work Moore published in the early 1930s and solidified her reputation with the cognoscenti, but it was her Collected Poems (1951), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, that finally gained the poet a wider readership. By the end of the 1950s, in a strange twist of fate, the notably esoteric and eccentric Moore had become a much-photographed celebrity, America’s favorite spinster aunt, a role she inhabited almost until her death in New York in 1972.