Musings on Moore

As I endeavour to finish my thesis on the poetry of Marianne Moore, I'm grappling with the question most commonly asked of me: "Why did you choose to write about Moore?" 

Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri (near St. Louis where, incidentally, T.S. Eliot was born) on November 15, 1887.  She never knew her father, who died of a nervous breakdown before she was born; along with her brother, she was raised by her mother in the home of her grandfather, a Presbyterian pastor. Moore attended Bryn Mawr College and received her B.A. in 1909 before teaching at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania for four years. In 1921, she became an assistant at the New York Public Library and began both to meet other poets (William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens) and to contribute to the Dial, a prestigious literary magazine, which she edited from 1925 to 1929.  In 1921, Imagist poet H.D. published Moore's first book, Poems, without Moore's knowledge.  Moore became widely recognized for her work; among her many honors were the Bollingen prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.  Moore was extremely attached to her mother, with whom she lived until Mrs. Moore's death in 1947.  Marianne Moore died in New York City in 1972 at the age of 84. 

So back to the question of what attracts me to Moore's poetry.  Firstly, to say that Moore was a character is a gross understatement; she never had a romantic relationship, she always appeared in public wearing a tri-corned hat and a cape, and she referred to her mother and brother as "Mole" and "Badger" respectively because of her fascination with Wind in the Willows.  But, moreover, the persona of Moore's poetry is an incredibly engaging and challenging puzzle.  In early work, Moore emphasized a need for discipline and heroic behavior; later, she stressed the need for spiritual grace and love.  To survive, she hinted, one must be alert, disciplined, and careful; as she put it, "What is more precise than precision?  Illusion."  Moore was extremely concerned with morality but never preached though she often questioned her role as an artist and, specifically, as a poet.  Her shortest poem, "Poetry," reads: "I, too, dislike it. / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it after all, a place for the genuine."  So was Moore modern or anachronistic, imagistic or objectivistic, lofty or realistic?  Critics continue to debate.

Unarguably, Moore's expression is characterized by deftness and sharpness of detail, linguistic experimentation, and integration of fresh observation. She teases the reader into looking at reality with keener vision, as if seeing the world for the first time.  She also challenges the reader to accept both the opposition and the unity between real and imaginary, animate and inanimate, ideal and object; she invites the reader to realize both the power and the futility of words.  As she says in my favourite quote of hers, "Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt." To those who complained that her poetry often seemed obscure, Moore once replied that something that was work to write ought to be work to read.  Why did I choose to write on Moore?  To attempt to untangle her complex network of observation and to explore an oeuvre dedicated to courage, loyalty, patience, modesty, spontaneity, and steadfastness.