Poems

Born in St. Louis, the "first lady of American poetry," Marianne Moore, graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1909. In 1918 she moved to New York City with her mother, remaining there for the rest of her life. She became a well-known character in her Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, easily recognizable in a large black hat and rather eccentric style. In 1921 a few of her friends pirated her work and published it under the title Poems. On her seventy-fifth birthday, November 15, 1962, she was honored by the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and in a special interview for the N.Y. Times, she spoke of her feelings concerning the treatment of poetry: "I'm very doubtful about scholasticizing poetry," she said. "I feel very strongly that poetry should not be an assignment but a joy." Five years later she said: "I wonder that I can bear myself to be in a world where they don't outlaw war." In 1967 Moore received both the MacDowell Medal and a Gold Medal. Mayor John Lindsay of New York City hailed her as "truly the poet laureate of New York City." The famed Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia has a collection devoted to her work and a detailed replica of a room in her Brooklyn home.

Moore brought to her work a prodigious knowledge and passionate interest in many diverse fields, including the arts, natural history, and public affairs. Her use of the images and language of these fields in her poetry enabled her to offset traditional poetic tones with the cadences of prose rhetoric and everyday speech. This talent, coupled with her precision and intricate metrics, make her one of the leading modernist poets.

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