Influential Modernist Movement poet Marianne Moore’s wit pushes boundaries of form and meaning

• Poetry

• I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
• all this fiddle.
• Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
• discovers in
• it after all, a place for the genuine.
• Hands that can grasp, eyes
• that can dilate, hair that can rise
• if it must, these things are important not because a

• high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
• they are
• useful. When they become so derivative as to become
• unintelligible,
• the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
• do not admire what
• we cannot understand: the bat
• holding on upside down or in quest of something to

• eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
• wolf under
• a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
• that feels a flea, the base-
• ball fan, the statistician—
• nor is it valid
• to discriminate against “business documents and

• school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
• a distinction
• however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
• result is not poetry,
• nor till the poets among us can be
• “literalists of
• the imagination”—above
• insolence and triviality and can present

• for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,”
• shall we have
• it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
• the raw material of poetry in
• all its rawness and
• that which is on the other hand
• genuine, you are interested in poetry.

Marianne Moore (1887-1972) is an American poet and considered one of the most influential poets of the Modernist Movement, taking her place among other literary greats of the early 20th century as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, H.D. and William Carlos Williams. Her style is at once formal and sprawling, precise yet encyclopedic, ironic yet at times tender, and always witty and pushing the boundaries of form and meaning. A lifelong baseball fan and long-suffering lover of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Moore is celebrated by both St. Louis, which claims her as a Missouri native, and New York City, where she eventually settled, as poetry’s grand dame.