Moore, Marianne (1887-1972), ranks with Emily Dickinson among America’s finest woman poets. Although some of her verse is difficult to understand, Moore crafted her poems superbly. She generally used poetic forms in which the controlling element is the number and arrangement of syllables rather than conventional patterns of meter.
Moore’s subjects—often birds, exotic animals, and other things in nature—may seem to limit her range, but she used them as symbols of honesty and steadfastness. These virtues mark her work, from Poems (1921) through Complete Poems (1967) and her critical prose collected in Predilections (1955). Her Collected Poems won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The Poems of Marianne Moore, published in 2004, after her death, included about 100 previously uncollected poems. New Collected Poems (2017) is a fresh survey of Moore’s entire poetic output. The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore was published in 1986, also after her death.
Marianne Moore was born in St. Louis on Nov. 15, 1887, and became a teacher and a librarian. As the editor of The Dial magazine from 1925 to 1929, Moore played an important part in encouraging young writers and publishing their work. She died on Feb. 5, 1972.
See also Poetry.
